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Abstract:
Positive behavior support (PBS) represents an empirically driven concern with quality of life (QOL), support through systems change, and linkage to multiple behavioral, social, and biomedical sciences. The major impediments to QOL are problem behavior, skill deficits, and dysfunctional systems. A model for addressing dysfunctional systems is presented, and its relationship to issues of behavior maintenance and sustainability of intervention efforts is described. The expansion of PBS to new populations and venues will likely be facilitated by linking this field to other disciplines, including organizational management, community/ecological psychology, cultural psychology, biomedical science, and positive psychology. Such linkage will enhance the development of PBS conceptually, methodologically, and empirically, culminating in a more effective and unique applied science.
In the history of every civilization, ideas have proven to be more durable than data (Randall, 1926). A case in point is the Bible. The Bible has no graphs, yet the ideas it contains have for centuries had a profound impact on civilization. On a less theological note, consider that B. F. Skinner's two most famous works, Science and Human Behavior (1953) and Verbal Behavior (1957), include numerous speculative chapters that do not contain a single graph, data point, or reference to published research. Yet, the ideas expressed have endured and have given meaning to the flood of data that followed their publication. It may be true that without great ideas, there are no great data (Butterfield, 1968), because ideas are what make data meaningful.
Positive behavior support (PBS) is a great and worthy idea predicated on the notion that creating a life of quality and purpose, embedded in and made possible by a supportive environment, should be the focus of our efforts as professionals. Our chief concern is not with problem behavior, and certainly not with problem people, but rather with problem contexts. To illustrate how many of us would trade our lives for the life of an adult assigned involuntarily to a group home or for the life of a child with disabilities who is attending a segregated school away from neighborhood friends? Our job is to redesign the counterproductive and unfair environmental contexts that so many people, with and without disabilities, have to contend with every day of their lives. Our job is to...