| Abstract: | Social skills are a vital component of successfully navigating the workplace. Employers expect employees to come to the job equipped with "work ready social skills" in competitive integrated employment settings. Students with disabilities often have difficulty regulating their behavior in social settings including meeting the social demands of the workplace. While numerous interventions to develop social skills have been conducted across a variety of participants and settings, this literature has not yet been synthesized. This dissertation includes three studies to investigate evidence of interventions to improve employment related social behaviors for students with disabilities. In the first study, I conducted a quality review of the single-case interventions fostering social skills of individuals with disabilities in the workplace using What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) standards. In the second study, I conducted a meta-analysis of single-case interventions focused on increasing social skills of individuals with disabilities in the work environment. In the third study, I conducted a survey on the use of job coaching as an intervention to increase workplace independence by focusing specifically on the perceptions of educators serving as job coaches, the strategies they currently use, and the training needs they identify. The electronic version of this dissertation is accessible from https://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/198496 |
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