Conversational skills training with a chronically hospitalized psychiatric inpatient

While conversational skills training has been conducted with select psychiatric populations, it has rarely been used with severely debilitated inpatients. The purpose of this study was to use a multiple baseline design across conversational components to evaluate the effectiveness of a conversational skills training package to enhance the conversational repertoire of a severely impaired inpatient. Audiotaped conversations with a standard confederate were evaluated for the frequency of questions, self‐disclosures, and reinforcing/acknowledging comments. Generalization probe conversations to novel partners were also obtained. Training effects were noted for the 3 conversational units. Mixed results were obtained for generalization and follow‐up.