The effects of online behavior skills training on safe social media usage of individuals with developmental disabilities

This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of behavioral skill training delivered online on acquisition of protection from trap messages of strangers on social media of individuals with intellectual disabilities. Opinions of participants, mothers of participants and four academicians who have Ph.D. in special education were also investigated in terms of social validity of the study. The study was designed with multiple probe design with probe trials across three women with intellectual disabilities. The whole process was carried out online in the study. After collecting baseline data, training sessions were conducted. Training sessions were utilized following behavioral skills training steps (instruction, modeling, role- playing and feed-back) including four different demand types (simple requests, appeals to authority, assistance requests and incentives) until participants met the 100% criterion on three consecutive sessions and then the level of generalization of acquired behavior of participants in novel context was examined by conducting natural probe sessions. Behavioral skills training booster sessions were utilized when the participants did not meet 100% criterion in novel context. The findings of the study demonstrated that behavioral skills training delivered online to individuals with intellectual disabilities was effective on acquisition of protection from trap messages of strangers on social media. The findings also showed that the participants of the study maintained the acquired behaviors and generalized them across different social media applications. Furthermore, opinions of the participants, the parents of the participants and the academicians were positive.