Promoting Desired Lifestyles Among Adults with Severe Autism and Intellectual Disabilities - Chapter 7: Ensuring access to preferences

This chapter focuses on providing specific aspects of agency supports and services in accordance with identified preferences of adults with severe disabilities. Initially, the importance of accessing preferences during daily activities on individual happiness (as introduced in Chapter 3) is briefly reviewed. Next, concerns are discussed in terms of how various activities within adult service agencies are often based on staff or “system” preferences instead of the preferences of individual adults. The remainder of the chapter describes specific ways of selecting and providing activities based on individual preferences, and especially when provision of choice opportunities (as presented in Chapter 6) is limited due to practical or safety issues. Special attention is also directed to the importance of expanding preferences of certain individuals who have highly restricted or repetitive preferences, and how strategies for expanding individual preferences through new experiences can be applied in ways enjoyable for individuals.