Functional Behavioral Assessment and Analysis

Abstract

This chapter discusses methods for collecting information on functional behavior and its analysis. A functional analysis is an experimental manipulation of antecedent and consequent events to identify the function of behavior. A second method, antecedent-behavior-consequence (ABC) observation, refers to recording the antecedent, behavior, and consequences in the natural environment during which clinicians record the antecedent and consequent events that occur in close temporal proximity to the target behavior. There are two ABC observation methods: structured and narrative/open-ended ABC observations. With structured ABC observations, a number of antecedent and consequent events are pre-defined and observers simply place a mark in the appropriate antecedent and consequent categories each time the target behavior occurs. With narrative ABC observations, the observer provides a brief written description of the activities or events that immediately preceded and followed the target behavior. Functional approaches, especially those associated with applied behavior analysis (ABA), focus on identifying independent variables that can be manipulated and that have a large impact on the problem behavior of interest for each specific person, resulting in idiosyncratic assessments and formulations for each individual. Descriptive assessments consist of directly observing challenging behavior and recording environmental events that the observer believes to be correlated with behavior. In contrast to descriptive assessments, functional analyses are those methods that involve the experimental manipulation of variables that the clinician believes to be causally related to the target behavior. Although these different methods share the common goal of attempting to identify the variables occasioning and maintaining instances of a problem behavior, the methods differ in terms of the strength of the conclusions about functional relations. Information obtained through functional analyses is regarded to provide the best/most accurate information, followed by direct and indirect assessment methods, respectively. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)