A Preliminary Evaluation of Written Individualized Habilitation Objectives and Their Correspondence with Direct Implementation

A process for examining the correspondence between written individualized habilitation plan (IHP) objectives and the actual implementation of instructional objectives by direct service staff is described and illustrated. Initially, the written IHP plans and objectives of 11 individuals with moderate to profound mental retardation who lived in three small community group homes were evaluated on a series of 16 quality indicators of best practice. Subsequently, the implementation of a randomly obtained subset of the IHP objectives was observed. The correspondence of specific aspects of the observed implemented objectives (i.e., age appropriateness, functionality, natural setting, prompting procedures, and positive consequence contingency) to the written IHP objectives was completed. Results indicated that the written IHP objectives varied with regard to the degree to which each addressed the 16 quality indicators. The evaluation of the correspondence between the written IHPs and the subset of implemented objectives indicated a high degree of desired correspondence on two indicators (i.e., age appropriateness, functionality). However, lower levels of correspondence were found on the other indicators (i.e., natural setting, prompting procedures, and positive consequence contingency). The reasons for the lack of correspondence between the written IHPs and implemented objectives were described.