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Reinforcer Sampling/Assessment

Description of the Strategy

Reinforcer sampling and assessment are procedures that guide—or serve as a component of—a variety of behavioral interventions. These procedures emerged from the field of behavior analysis and are easy for teachers, caregivers, and other providers to use. To define briefly, reinforcer sampling involves making freely available (i.e., administering noncontingently) a portion of a potential reinforcer (e.g., a taste of candy, movie preview) to increase the likelihood that the relevance and strength of the reinforcer will be maximized when it is made available contingently. Reinforcer assessment refers to the observation-driven or interview-based measurement of the relative strength of stimuli/events with regard to their reinforcing effects on behavior. These procedures are described in more detail below.

Reinforcer Sampling

A child's prior experience with an event or stimulus may influence the effect that the event or stimulus has on the child's behavior. For example, a child who has never tasted a particular piece of candy may be relatively uninfluenced by the statement “I will give you a piece of this candy if you share your toys with your brother.” If the child is first given a taste of the candy, however, the child may be more inclined to share with his or her brother when this contingency is stated. Researchers have also noted that prior experience with an event or stimulus in one context may not carry over into other contexts. Thus, it is important that sampling of the reinforcer(s) occurs in a setting that is as similar as possible to that in which the reinforcer will later be made contingently available.

On a larger scale, reinforcer sampling procedures can serve several of the same purposes that are served by reinforcer assessment procedures (described below). That is, when a range of reinforcers are made freely (i.e., noncontingently) available for sampling, providers and caretakers will have an opportunity to observe the relative strength of each reinforcer as measured by how often and for how long the child comes into contact with each type of reinforcer. For example, when a series of activities are made freely available for sampling (e.g., listening to music, eating ice cream, playing a game), some children may engage in certain activities more often than other activities. Some activities/events may not be approached at all, indicating to observers that those events—relative to events that are more frequently approached—may be relatively weak reinforcers.

Reinforcer Assessment

Interventions designed to decrease undesirable and increase desirable behavior require knowledge about which stimuli have reinforcing or punishing effects on a child's behavior. For one child, a mother's attention may have strong reinforcing effects, whereas for another child, mother's attention may be a weak reinforcer relative to a certain type of candy, playing with the dog, or playing with neighborhood friends. Thus, the success of a well-designed intervention may largely be dependent on whether the most appropriate reinforcers have been selected for a particular child. To increase the likelihood that a 5-year-old will share a toy with his or her sister, for example, a parent might model sharing and also try to shape the child's sharing behavior by reinforcing successive approximations of sharing. However, if the parent then attempts to reinforce any instance of actual sharing with a nonreinforcing or weakly reinforcing stimulus, the child may not continue to share with the sister. Even more problematic, negative attention can have reinforcing effects for some children, and it is not unusual for a parent to give negative attention to a child who is not complying with requests. Thus, if a parent attempts to reinforce sharing with a nonreinforcing stimulus, and then responds with negative attention when the child fails to comply with additional requests to share, the parent may in effect decrease the child's likelihood of sharing, despite using a procedure that is generally effective in managing behavior.

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