Methods to measure behavior
Number of times a behavior occurs. Example: Ryan had 8 instances of aggression.
What is frequency?
Naturalistic vs. contrived: Joy's behavior team completes an in-home assessment to determine if Joy engages in challenging behavior while completing ADLs in her own home.
What is Naturalistic?
Jen is at her doctors' office for her annual wellness physical. Prior to being seen by her doctor, the nurse has Jen fill out a Health Risk Assessment questionnaire. Using this form, Jen rates and answers questions about her current physical and mental health. One of the questions asks Jen about how she feels she is sleeping at night.
What is self-report?
Involves 2 observers, observing the same behavior, independently, and at the same time, using the same operational definitions, and comparing their data after.
What is interobserver Agreement (IOA)?
Lanie is at the BBHU taking data while texting her best friend. Dr. Smith comes into the observation room and stands behind her while she is taking data. Lanie stops texting, and ensures she is taking the best data possible to impress Dr. Smith with her data taking skills. She is capturing things that she would not normally capture, like duration for out of seat and positive affect.
What is Reactivity?
Measures how long behavior is performed. How one may measure "negative vocalizations".
What is duration?
Naturalistic vs. contrived: Carter engages in severe PICA. During his inpatient stay, the team stages a session room with safe items that resemble what he may engage in PICA with. These items include; rice cakes, rice paper, dried mushrooms and corn starch mixed with water.
What is contrived?
A type of measurement that includes how many intervals were filled with the behavior. This may be useful for measuring a tantrum.
What is whole-interval sampling?
You should not always rely on percentages! You should do this to see whether disagreements would have changed the interpretation of the intervention or conclusions of the data.
What is plot agreement data?
Emma has been on a patient's team since day 1. Now that she knows him better, she only scores aggressions if she thinks he really meant to do it. She describes to her co-worker, "even though they meet the definition, that one was more of a love tap. He didn't do it out of anger".
What is observer drift?
Measures how long it takes for behavior to begin/ the amount of time between a cue or event and the beginning of a response.
What is latency?
Observational vs automated: Andy works in the rat lab. Every time a rat presses a lever, the computer records this respnse.
What is automated?
A type of measurement that includes if behavior occured at all during the interval.
What is Partial-interval sampling?
= smaller total/larger total ×100 is used to calculate IOA when comparing total frequencies.
What is frequency ratio?
Zeinab likes to switch up the patient's btech team every so often. In doing so, she hopes to prevent this when it comes to data collection.
What is observer drift?
Heart rate, blood pressure, blood glucose and eye tracking are types of this measure.
What is psychophysiological/biological measures?
Obtrusive vs. unobtrusive: Isabella is an 8 year old girl at GCSN outpatient clinic. While in the session room, she sees that her preferred staff member is behind the observation glass (because the computer screen lights up their face, making it visible to Isabella). Isabella continually waves at this staff member and calls out their name.
What is Obtrusive?
A form of measurement based on direct products of behavior. It is often of obvious clinical relevance.
What is response-specific measures?
An important method for computing IOA. Assesses whether there is an agreement on each instance of observed behavior.
=A/A+D x100
What is point by point agreement?
Dr. Ana tells her btechs right before a functional analysis that her hypothesis is that the patient's behavior is attention maintained.
What is feedback?
Categorical classification of behavior as having
happened or not. In other words, a specific behavior occurred or did not occur.
Observational vs. automated: Chris works at the BBHU and uses BdataPro on his laptop to take session data. The KSF has a combination of frequency and duration keys that Chris uses to record what is happening.
What is observational?
A form of measurement tracking if behavior was occurring when the interval ended
What is momentary time sampling?
Base rate of behavior may affect agreement based on chance.
Low rate -> deflate agreement
High rate -> inflate agreement
What is chance agreement?