Peer social initiations and the modification of social withdrawal: a review and future perspective

In the initial portions of this paper the adult-mediated interventionstudies that led to the development of the peer social initiationstrategy are described. Notable findings from these adult-mediatedstudies include (a) that the immediate temporal consequenceof reinforcement delivery was a termination of child-child interaction;(b) that no intervention procedure studied resulted in spontaneousmaintenance and generalization effects, and (c) that maintenanceand generalization programming required elaborate proceduresthat are not logically feasible in most settings. Then the availableliterature on the peer social initiation tactic is summarized.Particular attention is paid to the need for training peer helpersand the relationship between subjects' behavioral repertoiresand the magnitude of immediate and long-term behavior change.Finally, several recommendations are offered for future researchon the effects of participating in a study on peer helpers,and programming for sustained behavior change.