Behavioral Assessment

Conceptual Foundations and Key Characteristics

The distinguishing characteristics of behavioral assessment are made more clear when they are contrasted against psychodynamic and personality assessment systems (e.g., those that use projective and personality assessment instruments such as the Rorschach and MMPI). These assessment systems assume that behavioral problems arise mostly from stable, internal, psychological processes such as unconscious conflicts, impaired object relations, and dysfunctional personality characteristics. Because internal and stable psychological processes are considered to be the main determinant of behavior problems, personality and projective assessment methods emphasize the measurement of internal experiences and personality characteristics. In addition, external environmental factors that can influence problem behavior (e.g., social relationships, how others respond to a problem behavior) are minimally evaluated.

In contrast, behavioral assessment emphasizes the measurement of external environmental factors (e.g., the social setting and how others respond to the person's behaviors), cognitive processes (e.g., thoughts, beliefs), and behavior (how a person acts in a particular environment). Behavioral assessment is closely tied to well-established models of learning such as operant conditioning, classical conditioning, and social learning. It is also strongly influenced by research—many studies have shown that people's environment, particularly their social environment, can influence the onset, maintenance, and cessation of behavior problems and how well treatment goals are achieved.

There are several conceptual foundations of behavioral assessment. The first, as suggested above, is environmental determinism. Environmental determinism stresses that how people behave, for example, the likelihood that an adult will experience anxiety when meeting a new person or that children with developmental delays will injure themselves, is affected by the situation they are in and how others have responded to that behavior in the past. It is assumed that learning principles (e.g., reinforcement, punishment, classical conditioning, modeling) can help us understand these behavior-environment relations. Thus, behavior problems and positive behaviors are thought of as logical responses to specific environmental events that precede, co-occur, and/or follow their occurrence.

A second foundation underlying behavioral assessment is an emphasis on empiricism: the idea that behavior problems can best be understood by the application of scientific methods. When applied to behavioral assessment, empiricism emphasizes the use of systematic observation, careful measurement and definitions of behaviors and environmental events, the use of well-validated assessment instruments, and control or monitoring of the assessment environment to learn about the form and function of behavior.

In addition to the two aforementioned conceptual foundations, there are several additional characteristics of behavioral assessment. First is an endorsement of the hypothetico-deductive method of learning about a client. In this method of inquiry, an assessor develops hypotheses about the behavior of a client and designs assessment strategies to test those hypotheses. For example, based on the hypothesis that a child is injuring himself or herself in order to escape from demanding learning situations, the assessor might systematically change how a teacher responds to the selfinjury, to see if this hypothesis is correct.

Another characteristic is an emphasis on the context of behavior: the idea that behavior is often influenced by an interaction between the environment and [Page 705]individual differences (e.g., the unique biological characteristics, culture, and learning history of a person). Thus, the form and causes of the same behavior problem can differ across persons and can differ across settings for one person.

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