The Future of First Wave Behavior Therapies

Abstract

For many, behavior analysis is considered as a major approach in the first wave of behavior therapies. Today there are solid indicators forecasting that behavior analysis will thrive in the future. There is a snowballing of the number of appropriately credentialed Board Certified Behavior Analysts, the professional infrastructure is sound, private-pay and third-party insurance sources of income needed to support the practice of applied behavior analysis (ABA) are growing, our scientific foundation is sound and expanding. Our Code of Ethics, supported by the Behavior Analyst Certification Board (BACB) is solid, and in my opinion is one of the most rigorous and comprehensive available. The number of avenues for becoming certified as a behavior analyst, via formal university-based degrees or by taking approved courses, is growing. I find these developments astonishing, considering the state of affairs when I entered the field in the late 1970s. My peers and I had little sense of how successful the field would become. We held the view that through behavior analysis we could help make over the existing practice disciplines. We believed that by showing how effective ABA services were, myriad clinical social workers, professional psychologists, educators, and other groups would eagerly substitute ABA practices their less effective, traditional practices, and in effect become much more behavioral in their orientation. This did not happen. ABA remains a minority practice perspective in most health care fields. It is the privilege of these fields to ignore the utility of the science of behavior. If they continue to do so, a Darwinian process will likely winnow out the less effective approaches to care and behavior analytic practices are well positioned to file the gap.