Applied Behavior Analysis

Applied behavior analysis (ABA) is a scientific approach to understanding and changing behavior. As an applied science, its adherents seek to understand and improve socially significant behavior, while showing reliable relationships between the environment and behavior (including relationships between treatment and behavior), using objective description, quantification, and experimental investigation. ABA can be distinguished from the experimental analysis of behavior (EAB), which studies learning but does not address socially significant behavior. For example, an EAB study might teach undergraduate psychology students to classify arbitrary visual patterns, whereas ABA might help a teacher learn how to teach a child with intellectual disabilities to discriminate shapes and numbers in classrooms.

ABA is often used as an intervention with children with intellectual and developmental disabilities and has become especially common for use with children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This entry further describes ABA, then discusses the basic concepts behind it and how these concepts are used in changing behavior. The entry concludes by discussing some of the advanced concepts used in ABA.

There are three levels of explanation of behavior in ABA: description, prediction, and control. Description includes objective description of the natural environment, such as the naturally [Page 76]occurring rates of parent–child interactions. Prediction refers to the identification of reliable correlational relationships between the environment and behavior, such as low rates of parent–child interactions occurring when phones are present. Control refers to the experimenter’s ability to turn behavior on and off because the experimenter has identified the variables of which behavior is a function (a functional analysis). For example, if phone usage results in reduced rates of parent–child interaction, then experimental control will be demonstrated if rates of parent–child interaction increase when parents put phones away before meal times, but not when phones are present.

ABA is based on principles of behaviorism. There are two important types of behaviorism: methodological behaviorism and radical behaviorism. Methodological behaviorism acknowledges the existence of private events, such as thoughts and feelings, but does not consider them subjects for scientific study and rejects them as causes of public behavior. Radical behaviorism, developed by B. F. Skinner, considers private behavior to be behavior that can be studied and understood using the same conceptual framework applied to public behavior. Hence, one could conduct a functional analysis of thinking and feeling by determining its controlling environmental variables. Thus, private behavior was not the cause of public behavior but behavior to be understood.

ABA can be applied to change a wide range of socially significant behavior such as reducing littering, teaching surgeons to tie surgical knots better, and helping kitchen staff behave more safely. Within the field of developmental and intellectual disabilities, family members, educational staff, and others have used ABA to teach children and adults at home, school, and work a wide range of skills, including self-help, language, social, educational, and vocational skills. Since the 1980s, ABA has become the preferred method of early intervention for young children with ASD, and such work is currently being extended to infants and children with Down syndrome. ABA has also made significant contributions to understanding and reducing problem behavior by environmental modifications and teaching alternate communication skills. Finally, a new profession of applied behavior analysts has developed, with many of these practitioners working with individuals with intellectual disabilities.

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