Comparison of Effectiveness of Role-playing and Problem-solving Methods on Social Skills in Individuals with Mild Intellectual Disability

The purpose of this research was comparing the effectiveness of role-playing and problem-solving methods on social skills in individuals with mild intellectual disability.
Research method was semi-experimental with pretest-posttest with control group. After reviewing the entry criteria numbers of 21 individuals with mild intellectual disability were selected through available sampling technique, and then randomly were divided into two experimental groups and one control group (totally three groups). Social Skills Questionnaire (Gresham and Elliott, 1999) was used for gathering data. First, the social skills scores were collected through questionnaires. After the pre-test, experimental groups were trained individually for 20 sessions. One group received problem-solving training and other group received role-playing training. After conducting training sessions the Social Skills Questionnaire was completed by control and experimental groups.
Results showed that social skills training increased mean score of social skills in post-test for both experimental groups, but this difference was not statistically significant. However comparison of means showed that the role-playing method had a greater impact on the acquisition of social skills.
According to these findings, can be said that the ways to keep people involved in education can have more impact on the acquisition of social skills in people with intellectual disabilities have.