Social Intervention and Adaptive Skills Development

Four Key Points for Social Intervention

1. Establishing a working relationship with the user to take into account two basic objectives: efficiency and mutual satisfaction.
2. Training and support, including resources, technology, and human resources, for the procurement and implementation of different adaptive abilities in users.
3. Providing users with tools and strategies to cope with and solve their needs; working toward the goal of enabling people to manage their lives and make their own decisions.
4. Motivating users to participate actively in social life and their community.

Personal and Social Autonomy Skills

Adaptive Behavior and Skills

This learning involves the acquisition of a set of habits, personal skills, and social autonomy that allow individuals to adapt to their environment, demonstrating adaptive behavior. When discussing mental retardation, we refer to people who show substantial limitations in current functioning. We pointed out that these restrictions are presented in two or more of the ten possible adaptive skill areas.

Professional Skills for Social Intervention

• Communication: In the area of communication, professionals should focus on active listening, oral language proficiency, professional written and emotional communication, and the use of gestures, postures, and glances—all appropriate to the message and the context of intervention.
• Social Skills: Resolving or mediating group disputes, separating personal from professional issues, knowing how to say "no," being a team player, making decisions, making requests, expressing opinions, facing criticism, maintaining satisfactory relationships with users and other professionals, and showing initiative.
• Workplace Skills: Providing, collecting, organizing, and evaluating information; scheduling, organizing, developing, and evaluating social integration activities; meeting and organizing human resources, institutional support, and technical assistance; being responsible for activities and materials; delegating responsibility; and encouraging group participation.

Support for Users and Groups

The existence of people and groups in society who, due to their personal characteristics or environment, might present difficulties in adaptation or autonomy highlights the need for ways to offset these challenges. Currently, collective intervention aims to work on those adaptive skills where people face problems due to lack or inadequacy.

To achieve this purpose, different training programs and support in adaptive skills are designed to enhance and improve the autonomy and independence of individuals, consequently boosting their self-esteem and quality of life.