Teaching Self-Advocacy Skills: A Review and Call for Research

Self-advocacy is an effective means of attaining required accommodations and services for adults with developmental disabilities. Previous reviews exist on related topics but have not been comprehensive or specific to the act of teaching self-advocacy skills. The purpose of this review is to begin to fill this gap by identifying studies that have taught self-advocacy skills to this and similar populations through the deployment of a PRISMA-style literature review. A total of 67 publications were identified and coded for several variables including participant age and diagnoses, training methods, setting, duration, target behaviors, reports of generalization, maintenance, and social validity, and research design and quality. The results are summarized with suggestions for future research on this important topic.