Creative Daily Scheduling: A Nonintrusive Approach to Challenging Behaviors in Community Residences

Abstract

How a person's day is organized contributes to his or her quality of life. Some people choose to go about their day in a highly structured manner, whereas others choose to function in a more unplanned fashion. Many residential programs, however, do not take these types of life-style preferences into consideration when designing daily activity or routine schedules. Guidelines are presented for individualizing each person's daily schedule of routines to reflect better his or her preferred lifestyle. In so doing, increased control over daily life will be offered to each person. Manipulation of an individual's daily routine also represents a nonintrusive, multicomponent strategy for reducing challenging behaviors and increasing meaningful participation in daily life. The routine schedule offers a method of incorporating information from functional analysis into natural contexts across the day. Four dimensions are presented that can be systematically manipulated as independent variables to address challenging behavior in community residences. Examples are presented to demonstrate the application of schedule manipulations.