Theories for Building Better Peer Support: Theory 3 - Social Learning Theory

Social Learning Theory (Bandura, 1977) emphasizes the role of watching and imitating others as a primary way in which people learn new information and behaviors.  We all do this all the time.  We watch those around us – tracking how they act and the positive and negative consequences that result from their actions. 

The ideas of modeling and the important concept of “role models” was developed from Social Learning Theory.  Peer Support Specialists have an explicit role of being a model of recovery to the clients they work with.  Social Learning Theory suggests that simply having Peer Support Specialists working in clinical settings is not necessarily going to produce a positive effect for clients.  Their impact depends on what those peers do and how they do it.

Consider the following strategies for your work, based on Social Learning Theory:

1.     Clients will learn from your modeling IF they have chances to see you engage in those behaviors.  You want to think about what do you want them to learn from you?  Do you want them to see how you deal with symptoms, how you deal with clinicians, how you use peer support groups, how you deal with your own experiences with setbacks?  For each target behavior, ask yourself how you can model that for your clients in a way that they can see you in action – see you in a way that they can learn a new behavior.

 2.     Make those behaviors visible to your clients.  This may require that you take them out into the community so that they can see you in action.  It may require that you talk openly about how you are currently dealing with specific challenges.  It is not enough to just tell recovery stories about how you did this in the past – they need to see you do it in the present.

 3.     Think about settings in which clients need to perform key behaviors.  Consider if you can take them to those settings so that they can see you as a model in those settings.  This could be social settings, self-help groups settings, clinical settings, work settings, school settings, leisure settings, etc.

 4.     In conversations with your clients, emphasize your similarity to them.  Social Learning Theory suggests that we tend to learn from models who we see as similar to us.  To maximize your impact, you want to emphasize all of the ways that you are similar to that client.  It could be in your experience of illness.  It could be in background variables such as race, gender, where you grew up, experiences of failures, experiences of success, etc.  At the same time, don’t over-estimate the importance of similarities.  We all learn from people who are different from us as well.

 5.     Develop a diverse Peer Support Specialist team so that your team can provide models who are similar to the diverse clients you serve.  I have known peer support teams that consisted only of men.  They had great difficulty working successfully with clients who were women.  Consciously build diverse teams and then be aware of the differences so that you can call on the right peer to be a model of a specific client. 

 6.     Talk openly with your clinical team about how you are modeling behaviors.  Ask their input about how to improve the modeling aspect of your work.  Working with your team,  try new ways to enhance the modeling that you and your Peer Support Specialist team do.

REFERENCES

Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Englewood Cliffs.