Editorial: A behavioral development approach in early intervention.

Abstract

When Joe Cautilli explained to me why he invited me to serve as an associate editor for JEIBI, I was delighted to accept. His reasoning was that he felt application in behavioral interventions would benefit from being informed by the basic that I could bring to the journal. JEIBI was already a behavioral journal that invited research, review, and theory articles that went beyond the range of those found in the long-established behavioral journals. Despite the name, JEIBI was already including perspectives not easily fitting the rubric Early Intensive Behavioral Intervention. I was trained as a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology at SUNY at Stony Brook. I think it was viewing Ivar Lovass' film, Behavior Modification: Teaching Language to Psychotic Children (1969) that initially captured my interest in behavior analysis. I was first taught behavior analysis by Grover Whitehurst, one of Sidney Bijou's last graduate students at the University of Illinois, although I also was fortunate to take a JEAB-based seminar from Howard Rachlin among other behavioral courses. Most of you know that Sidney Bijou and Donald Baer published a series of small books that presented a systematic behavioral treatment of child development, and I was introduced to these by Whitehurst at Stony Brook. This series provided the fundamental training in behavioral development for a couple of generations of behavior analysts and its natural science approach is the foundation for Novak & Pelaez's Child and Adolescent Development: A Behavioral Systems Approach (2004). What is a developmental perspective and why is it needed? A approach is contextualistic, with an emphasis on the historical context. That is, change in behavior is understood in terms of the history of interactions the individual has with his or her physical and social environments. Development is defined as the progressive changes in interactions between the behaviors of a person and the events in his or her environments (Bijou & Baer, 1961, 1978; Novak & Pelaez, 2004). The behavioral is different from non-developmental behavior analysis in that the former is interested in longer-run interactions, typically months and years as opposed to the relatively brief number of sessions in behavioral interventions. Second, the is to view the process as naturally occurring rather than contrived under experimental conditions. Thus, while most behavior analysts look at changes due to planned interventions under controlled conditions, behavior analysts view development as a natural process occurring in natural, uncontrolled settings. That means that they study process in the manner suggested by Baer (1973). First, it is necessary to observe relationships between naturally varying environmental conditions and naturally occurring behaviors. Second, once these relations are observed in the natural environment, they should be studied under controlled conditions to establish functional relationships. Third, once these functional relationships are identified, they should be brought back to the natural environment and studied under controlled conditions to verify that the relations function there as well. …