Superhero Social Skills: Video Analysis

Children with intellectual disability participated in an intervention called Superhero Social Skills that focused on behavioral training to gain positive social skills through the process of video modeling and demonstration of newly acquired social skills. This intervention provided children with intellectual disability a chance to gain skills pertaining to expressing wants and needs, initiating and holding conversations, taking turns, and emotion regulation (O’Handly, Ford, Radly, Helbig, & Wimberly, 2016). This intervention was held in three weeks times with two sessions a week. The children in the intervention watched videos that helped them to foster positive social skills. During the videos the children would learn steps to obtain their
targeted goals. Different objectives were set for each goal. Basic objectives were set to help the children to improve their social functioning like appropriate posture when holding conversations and initiating and maintaining eye contact. More precise objectives where then set depending on the goal. For example, in the turn taking goal the children worked to enhance verbal communication for deciding who goes first, waiting for turn without interruption, and making sure that all people get a turn. During the videos the children watched how to achieve these different goals and what steps need to be taken. After watching the videos discussion was followed to talk about the different steps and the goals obtained. After discussion the children would then role play the different steps that they learned. During role-play the children worked to proficiently use their new skill three times before they could move on to playing games that enhanced the newly acquired social skill. The social game required the child to utilize their new skill. The social games provided the children with hands on activities that helped to foster their new social skill. After the children finished their game, they then viewed a video containing social stories that incorporated their new skill (O’Handly et al., 2016).
The intervention was found to be successful in providing children with intellectual disability positive social skills like expressing needs and wants, initiating and maintaining conversation, and turn taking. The children in the study also obtained basic social skills like appropriate posture when speaking to others and initiating and maintaining eye contact. Overall the study concluded that this intervention was significant in providing children with intellectual disability positive social functioning skilling (O’Handly et al., 2016).