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Chapter 1 |
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Chapter Summary
The word science has come to mean many things, but when used properly it refers to a systematic approach for seeking and organizing knowledge about the natural world. Science, then, has really one overall goal: to achieve a thorough understanding of the phenomena under study. In the field of applied behavior analysis, this means socially important behaviors. There are three levels of understanding that yield different types of knowledge within science: description, prediction, and control. Functional relations exist only when well-controlled experiments reveal that a specific change in the dependent variable can reliably be produced by specific manipulations of the independent, and the change was unlikely to be the result of confounding variables.
Science is foremost a set of attitudes—an overriding set of assumptions and values that guide the work of all scientists. The attitudes include: determinism, empiricism, experimentation, replication, parsimony, and philosophic doubt. Determinism is the attitude upon which science is predicted; the presumption that the universe is a lawful and orderly place in which all phenomena occur as the result of other events. Determinism provides the framework in the field of behavior analysis—that all behavior is the result of specifiable conditions, and once identified, these conditions can be used to some extent to determine the future occurrence of behavior. Other qualities that guide success in science include thoroughness, curiosity, perseverance, diligence, ethics, and honesty.
These principles and attitudes serve as a basis for behavior analysis. Behavior analysis consists of three major branches of study: behaviorism; basic research, or the experimental analysis of behavior; and applied behavior analysis, or the development of a technology for improving behavior. Behavior analysis can be traced back to John B. Watson and what became known as Watsonian behaviorism or stimulus-response psychology. B.F. Skinner is credited, though, as being the founder of the experimental analysis of behavior; he wrote extensively on the science. Skinnerian behaviorism differs significantly from prior approaches to the study of behavior, most of which involved mentalism. Mentalism is an approach which assumes behavior is the result of inner causes and hypothetical constructs. Behaviorism aims to explain behavior in terms of measurable and observable events. Skinner’s radical behaviorism incorporates private events into an overall conceptual system of behavior, whereas other types of behaviorism do not include private events.
One of the first studies to apply the principles of operant behavior to humans was by Fuller in 1949. The field of applied behavior analysis grew in the 1950s and 1960s as researchers began to apply methods of experimental analysis of behavior to determine if principles of behavior demonstrated in laboratory settings with nonhumans could be replicated with humans in naturalistic settings. Applied behavior analysis as it is now known can be traced to the work of Ayllon and Michael in 1959. The field began to expand and two significant events in 1968 marked the formal beginning of contemporary applied behavior analysis: (1) the publication of the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis and (2) the publication of “Some Current Dimensions of Applied Behavior Analysis,” by Baer, Wolf, and Risley.
Baer et al. (1968) provided recommendations for applied behavior analysis which later became the field’s defining characteristics. These defining characteristics state that applied behavior analysis should be applied, behavioral, analytic, technological, conceptual, effective, and capable of generalized outcomes. As the field of applied behavior analysis continues to grow and approach a wide variety of problems additional characteristics have been suggested, but the original defining characteristics as proposed by Baer et al. (1968) remain the standard.
Chapter Objectives
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