Abstract
The purpose of the present paper is to report the results of clinical experimentation at a residential institution for people with intellectual disabilities on an organizational helping system that consists of 6 behavioral packages for staff, focused on increasing needs-related behavior and mastering needs-solving skills, as well as on reinforcing these organizational outcomes, and to discuss a future methodological framework for residential services and the role of applied behavior analysis in this program. The results from 3 years' research showed that the organizational helping system significantly enhanced the professional helping functions of the institution, and produced dramatic improvements in the adaptive behavior and decreases in the maladaptive behavior of the residents with intellectual or developmental disabilities. These findings suggest that this new system could play an important role in efforts to provide optimal quality of life for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities living in residential institutions. The system may be applicable to community-based services for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities and other human service settings as well.
