Content area
Full Text
Abstract
Functional analysis methodology has become the hallmark of behavioral assessment, yielding a determination of behavioral function in roughly 96% of the cases published (Hanley, Iwata, & McCord, 2003). Some authors have suggested that incorporating the results of a descriptive assessment into the design of a functional analysis may be useful in determining behavioral function when initial functional analyses yield undifferentiated results, yet this strategy has little empirical support to date. This study evaluated the effects of incorporating stimuli observed to occasion problem behavior during a descriptive assessment into the design of a functional analysis that had previously resulted in low and undifferentiated levels of problem behavior. Further, the effects of a function-based treatment derived from the results of the "informed" functional analysis were evaluated across settings (therapy room and preschool classroom) and people (therapist and classroom teachers). The somewhat complex relation between descriptive assessments and functional analyses are discussed.
KEY WORDS: functional, analysis, descriptive, assessment, automatically reinforced behavior, response blocking, preschoolers
Pre-treatment functional analyses (Iwata, Dorsey, Slifer, Bauman, & Richman, 1982/1994) involve the direct observation of problem behavior under at least one test condition in which the effects of a particular consequence for problem behavior are evaluated in the presence of a relevant establishing operation (EO) and one control condition in which the same consequence and establishing operation is absent. In a recent review, Hanley, Iwata, and McCord (2003) identified 277 published empirical studies involving functional analyses which appeared in 34 scholarly journals and an additional 215 book chapters, reviews, discussion pieces, or commentaries regarding functional analysis methodology. In the two largest reviews conducted of functional analysis results, behavioral function was determined in 96% of the instances in which this methodology was applied (Hanley et al., 2003; Iwata, Pace, et al., 1994). However, the published data show that inconclusive analyses do occur and presumably the number of undifferentiated analyses is even higher in practice.
Analyses may yield inconclusive results when the discriminative stimuli and establishing operations arranged in the analyses fail to occasion or evoke the target behavior (Fisher, Lindauer, Alterson, & Thompson, 1998), or if idiosyncratic reinforcers responsible for behavioral maintenance are absent from the analysis (Richman & Hagopian, 1999). When initial analyses yield undifferentiated or inconclusive findings, some have suggested incorporating...