Effects of Parent-Administered, Home-Based, High-Probability Request Sequences on Compliance by Children with Developmental Disabilities

In the high-probability request sequence (high-p) procedure, a requester presents a rapid sequence of requests a child is known to be likely to comply with, followed by a request to perform a response for which there is a low probability of compliance (low-p request). To extend previous research from institutional and research settings to home settings, parents of three developmentally-delayed children who were noncompliant were taught to use the high-p procedure at home using a manual, supplemented by only brief therapist instruction. In addition they were taught to use a fading procedure to enhance the maintenance of any gains in compliance. The manual-based, high-p procedure, implemented in a multiple-baseline across behaviors replicated across children design, increased compliance with at least one targeted low-p response in all children, and two thirds of the targeted responses maintained gains in compliance at follow-up, after fading of the high-p procedure.