Assessment Basics
The two directions that behaviour change can occur in.
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Increasing behaviour (skill acquisition) or decreasing behaviour (behaviour reduction)
Practitioners should consider these types of target behaviours for assessment.
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Socially significant behaviours
If I go into a home to conduct an assessment and ask the parents to set up the kitchen in a certain way when assessing cooking skills, I am conducting this type of observation.
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A structured observation
Writing my name on a piece of paper leaves this.
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A permanent product
This measure of repeatability requires data to be reported within a given time period.
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Rate or frequency
The assessment procedures that are used to gather information about behaviour, without observing it directly.
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Indirect assessment
This term indicates that goals that are socially significant for one person may not be as relevant or significant to the next person.
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An individualized goalI could be measuring one of these two dimensions of behaviour if I am timing something for my data collection.
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Temporal extent or locus
This type of behaviour can only be recorded via permanent product if the permanent product is created independent of the behaviour happening by itself (e.g., recording a video).
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A transitory behaviour
The duration per session data point is this if I have collected the following duration per occurrence data: 30 seconds, 2 minutes, 5.5 minutes, and 45 seconds.
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8 minutes and 45 seconds
When conducting an initial intake interview with a caregiver, this is an important thing to foster with that person to ensure the information you are collecting is accurate and complete.
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Rapport/trust
These represent two things that should NOT appear in an operational definition.
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1. Subjective labels2. Statements about the absence of behaviour ("not" statements)
These four characteristics represent what we are aiming for with data collection systems in ABA.
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Empiricism, determinism, replication, and analytical
Measuring this type of behaviour using the repeatability dimension would give us inaccurate, invalid data.
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A continuous behaviour
I am using this type of interval recording if I mark an interval as occurring if the behaviour happens once, three times, or thirty times within the recording interval.
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Partial-interval recording
Assessment often revolves around identifying patterns between these two things.
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Behaviour and environment
Clear operational definitions are important to help get everyone on the same page about data collection. This helps to ensure that this characteristic of measurement is met.
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Reliability
If I measure behaviour indirectly, or during irrelevant time periods, I am possibly impacting this important characteristic of a measurement system.
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Validity
Using a measurement system based on temporal extent would produce the same duration data each time recording occurred for this type of behaviour.
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A discrete behaviour
These three things could impact someone while collecting data, impacting the validity of that data.
HINT: reactivity is not one of the three!
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Measurement complexity
Observational bias
Observer awareness
This type of assessment focuses on diagnosis and categorizing individuals via norms, which is different from the assessment that a behaviour analyst would conduct.
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A psychological assessment
An operational definition includes a label for the behaviour, a specific definition of the behaviour, non-examples that shouldn't be included in data collection, and this description of the different forms that the behaviour can take.
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Possible variations
If I am interested in knowing how frequently my client sticks out their tongue at their teacher, to ensure my measurement is valid, I should target this dimension of behaviour.
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Repeatability
A complete record of the occurrences of the target behaviour is not produced when using systems defined as this.
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Discontinuous measurement
Inter-observer agreement calculations, in general, are improved when calculations are completed within these vs. across the combined data collected for one session.
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Intervals