"Would I be able to ... "? Teaching clients to assess the availability of their community living life style preferences.

A three-phase program was developed to involve six institutionalized adults with mild mental retardation in their transition to community living. In Phase I, subjects were interviewed to determine their community living life style preferences and were found to be reliable and skillful in stating their preferences. In Phase II, the subjects' 10 strongest preferences were identified. In Phase III, they were taught to obtain preference availability information from group home representatives and report these findings to their social worker. A simultaneous replication design across two component skills, questioning and reporting, revealed that both increased after training and generalized to community group homes. The 5 subjects available for follow-up maintained their posttraining performance. Implications of these results in extending choice and decision-making technology were discussed.