Echoes of good bye.

Abstract

There is something so universal about saying goodbye: Universal and sad. The minute after I uttered the words that I was leaving Journal of Early and Intensive Behavioral Intervention (JEIBI) at the last meeting of the Behavior Analyst Online Governing board Meeting in 2007, so that I could free up time for the two new journal assignments the words seemed to echo with me. For the rest of the meeting, much of my energy went into maintaining the appearance that this was an easy decision for me. It was not and the words stayed several days. My thoughts traveled back to a time when Craig Thomas was first proposing the journal. I actually opposed the initial proposal. Craig spent several persistent conversations talking me into it. We had the Behavior Analyst Today at that point, were their really enough articles to start a new journal? I spent almost a year gathering the editorial team and convincing authors to take a risk and send us their articles. I assured them that since the Behavior Analyst Today was a success this journal would be too and thus JEIBI was borne. At the time, we were concerned that the journal would become very limited in scope- early intervention for children with autism. These concerns were not unique to us and others have since echoed similar concerns about the field of behavior analysis. The three that most influence the development of Journal of Early and Intensive Behavioral Intervention were (1) Loss of mission for the field of behavior analysis (2) the field had become withdrawn and isolated (Critchfield, 2002) and (3) and timid in its application focusing mostly on the use of contingency management procedures and ignoring recent developments in the basic literature such as focus on the matching law, research on momentum, relational frames, and (O'Donohue & Fryling, 2007). One of the major concerns was loss of mission, simply stated was that behavior analysis was becoming a subfield of developmental disabilities (Hayes, 2001). With the above concerns, we began to invite authors for the first issue and if truth were known we caught a lucky break. The first few issues of a journal are often considered the defining issues. Readers look at those issues and decide if their work is suitable for the journal. Many of the early invites for people in developmental disabilities were returned as not having the time. This allowed our first issue to be focused mainly on a diverse array of issues including two excellent articles on typical children. So the first issue helped us define ourselves broadly and we were luck in avoiding most of the three criticisms about the field of behavior analysis as a whole. …