John Austin James E. Carr Handbook of Applied Behavior Analysis
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
US $69.95 Psychology Austin A Survey of Behavior Analysis Applications Carr Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) is a highly functional discipline that, instead of searching for abstract, internal causes for human behavior, looks to external factors that can be influenced. Once identified, these factors can be manipulated to make meaningful, positive improvements in the lives of real people through positive Handbook behavior change. Not surprisingly behavior analysis has been applied to a wide range of human activities, from helping troubled teens to organizing industry to Applied Behavior Analysis maximizing sports performance. ABA interventions for these diverse problems are often creative—and they tend to be effective. In this volume, some of the field’s foremost practitioners offer their expert perspective of Applied on a range of topics within ABA. Each chapter is fully referenced and contains a set of reading objectives to facilitate deeper understanding and further discussion of Handbook of its subject area. While these discussions will be of particular interest to academic behavior analysts and graduate students, clinicians and other practitioners will find the research review helpful and informative. Behavior Topics include: • Functional Analysis • Behavioral Acquisition • School Psychology • Pediatric Medicine • Child Delinquency • Child Delinquency • Sports Psychology • Autism and Developmental Disability • College Teaching • The future of ABA Analysis • Industrial and organizational applications John Austin, Ph.D., is associate professor of psychology and a member of the industrial/organizational faculty at Western Michigan University. He received his BS from the University of Notre Dame in 1991 and completed his doctorate at Florida State University. James E. Carr, Ph.D., is associate professor of psychology and a member of the behavior analysis faculty at ISBN-13: 978-1878978-34-9 Western Michigan University. He ISBN-10: 1-878978-34-9 received his BA from the University of North Florida in 1991 and completed his 56995 doctorate at Florida State University in 1996. CONTEXT John Austin PRESS James E. Carr Context Press 9 781878 978349 www.contextpress.com Handbook of Applied Behavior Analysis Dedication One can read Baer, Wolf, and Risley (1968, 1987) to find the still-current dimensions of applied behavior analysis. An appreciation of these dimensions is necessary, but not sufficient, for the development of skilled applied behavior analysts (nor was it argued to be). That is, the effective training of applied behavior analysts does not occur solely through didactic instruction of the behavioral literature, but also through the mentorship process. Such mentoring requires a sort of assiduousness and devotion that is far too high a cost for most to pay, as it means that training applied behavior analysts must be your life. We dedicate this book to the devoted professor who mentored us, as well as over 50 other doctoral-level applied behavior analysts...Jon S. Bailey, Ph.D. Handbook of Applied Behavior Analysis Edited by John Austin and James E. Carr Western Michigan University Foreword by Beth Sulzer-Azaroff CONTEXT PRESS Reno, Nevada Handbook of Applied Behavior Analysis Copyright © 2000 Context Press Context Press is a division of New Harbinger Publications, Inc. 5674 Shattuck Avenue Oakland, CA 94609 www.newharbinger.com Distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. PDF ISBN: 978-1-60882-627-8 ââ The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as: Handbook of applied behavior analysis / edited by John Austin and James E. Carr; foreword by Beth Sulzer-Azaroff. p. cm. Includes bibiiographical references ISBN-13: 978-1-878978-34-9 ISBN-10: 1-878978-34-9 1. Behavioral assessment. 2. Behavioral modification. I. Austin, John, 1969- II. Carr, James E. RC473.B43 H36 2000 616.89’075--dc21 00-052362 v Introduction John Austin and James E. Carr Western Michigan University The primary goal of this text is to provide a survey of over a dozen areas in which behavioral principles have been applied. We do not intend this to be a procedural manual, but rather a reference for those interested in an overview of behavioral applications. We refer to the text as a "handbook" because of its breadth. However, many areas in which quality behavioral work is being conducted have not been included in this version of the text. We hope to highlight some of those areas (e.g., behavioral gerontology) in a future edition. The primary target audiences for this text are academic behavior analysts and graduate students. However, we also hope that practitioners find the research reviews informative. The text is organized into two general sections. Chapters 1 through 11 focus on "clinical" areas in which behavioral principles have been applied. Chapters 12 through 19 generally cover organizational and instructional areas. The final chapter is a perspective on the future of applied behavior analysis. Each chapter surveys the previous and contemporary research in its domain of interest, and includes directions for future research in the area. We have each used a pre-printed version of this text to teach graduate-level survey courses in applied behavior analysis. The content and level of writing seem to be well suited for graduate courses. In addition, each chapter includes 10 reading objectives to facilitate instructional use. We thank the following individuals for their assistance in editing and reviewing chapters for this book: Sean Coriaty, Debra Fredericks, Brian Gaunt, Scott Harrington, David Hatfield, Tom Higbee, Kate Kellum, and David Wilder. We look forward to receiving feedback on this text so that we may produce a better version in the future. Please address correspondence to Dr. John Austin or Dr. James E. Carr at Department of Psychology, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5052 (E-mail: [email protected] and [email protected]). vi Foreword Beth Sulzer-Azaroff Professor Emeritus University of Massachusetts We were there in the beginning. It was the fall of 1956; easy to remember because I was pregnant with my first child, David. Edward Sulzer, my late husband, had been discharged from the US army in June and returned to Columbia University to study clinical psychology. Previously, I had been teaching in inner-city elementary schools and studying school psychology. One day Ed came home and excitedly told me about a new invention, the air crib (Ladies’ Home Journal, 1945). One of his professors, either Keller or Schoenfeld, had described this safe, comfortable, infant environment during a class on learning. Although Ed had become acquainted with Murray Sidman and Lawrence Stoddard while stationed at Walter Reed Hospital, that course was Ed’s first systematic exposure to behavioral psychology and he was finding it intriguing. It seemed so compatible with his hard science background as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. The long and short of it was that when David was born, his bed was an air crib, and Ed and I had become very intrigued by behavior analysis. By the early sixties, our second son, Richard had outgrown the air crib. Ed was a member of the University of Minnesota Medical School faculty and I had entered a doctoral program in psychology. About that time, an applied behavioral literature was beginning to emerge. As a field, we began to use and report on the newly evolving behavioral therapy methods applied to our clinical populations. I actively studied the research literature spinning out from Skinner’s (1958) provocative paper on teaching. Not much had been published yet: a few papers and Skinner’s books. I did have the good fortune to serve as a teaching assistant in Kenneth McCorquodale’s superb course on behavior analysis. The text was The Analysis of Behavior, the one Holland and Skinner programmed in 1961. It included many everyday examples of the principles of behavior in action. In those early years it was largely by word-of-mouth, however, that we found out what others were doing. One highlight was a conference Ed and some of his colleagues organized on the topic of behavior modification. Other experts visited the University of Minnesota to give talks or short courses. Among others, the people who we had the pleasure of meeting were Jack Michael, Nathan Azrin, Sidney Bijou, Ivar Lovaas, Jay Birnbrauer, and the great B.F. Skinner himself. vii If one were to attempt to characterize the behavior modification/therapy/ analysis of the late fifties and early sixties, probably it could best be labeled piecemeal. Most practitioners were addressing specific individual or small-group behavioral challenges: delayed learning in the “retarded,” aberrations among “psychotic,” “neurotic” and “autistic” clients, problems with eating, studying, interpersonal relations and so on. We learned from each other about how to apply differential reinforcement to reduce problem performances and shape and increase adaptive behaviors, while keeping loose - by today’s standards - measures of progress. It seemed to be this creative combination of applying procedures based on principles of learning and behavioral measurement that so many of us found attractive. The procedures helped behavior to improve and the measures informed us of such successes. By the time I had completed my doctoral studies in 1965, just ahead of my third child, Lenore, Nathan Azrin enticed Ed to join the faculty at Southern Illinois University (SIU). His task there was to organize the first full-scale graduate training program in behavior modification in the country. In concert with Azrin’s Behavior Research Laboratory at Anna State Hospital, the program shortly attained true excellence. It attracted as faculty, students, and visitors, some of yesterday and today’s world leaders in the field. Concurrently I joined the SIU faculty of the School of Education and immediately began teaching, practicing, and doing research in behavior analysis.