Issues for the consulting behavior analyst: EO's, SD's, and promoting business versus promoting the science of behavior analysis.

Abstract

Recently there has been an increased interest in Skinner's (1957) Verbal Behavior, most notably among parents of with seeking to reverse and correct devastation of condition. The current commentary suggests that with of Skinner's analysis and subsequent application in clinical treatment that analyst's have a responsibility to properly educate community about history of analysis of verbal and to adequately train people who conduct protocols using Skinner's analysis or suffer lessons of past. ********** Recently there has been an increased interest in Skinner's 1957 Verbal Behavior. This is a long awaited change among those of us who have studied Skinner's work and have long believed in validity of his analysis. Much of new interest in this body of work has come about due to application of Skinner's analysis by Sundberg and Partington with who have autism. This work is outlined in 1998 book Teaching Language to Children With Autism or Other Developmental Disabilities and formalized through publication of their assessment manual The ABLLS Protocol (Partington & Sundberg, 1998). This protocol in hands of someone familiar with functional analysis of verbal is a powerful tool not only in assessing deficits and strengths in verbal behavior, but in creating an intervention program for with deficit verbal repertoires. Note that I have not specifically stated children with autism because truth be known when assessment is used appropriately with with other developmental disabilities it is just as powerful in assisting to determine deficit repertoires. Although, sudden given rise to Skinner's analysis is due mainly to it's application in community, it seems important to remember that this is indeed verbal behavior. The analysis applies to all organisms when learning to become members of their verbal community and operants are apparent in every verbal community. Perhaps most important statement that must be made at this point is that along with this rise in popularity among analysts comes a large responsibility. The most important thing that Behavior Analysts could do for analysis, and more focally analysis of verbal is to properly educate people about history of analysis, basic and applied taking this opportunity to promote our science, and not just businesses. Behavior Analysts should not commit same sins that linguist, psychodynamic researchers and clinicians of past have committed. In an article by John Eshelman and Ernest Vargas (1988) pair speaks of promoting behaviorological analysis of verbal behavior. They note several issues of commission and omission that they account for general malaise surrounding radical behaviorist analysis of verbal behavior. Do we not commit same wrong when we allow public, for whatever reason, to call analysis of verbal the new method of ABA or to say that discrete trial training, direct instruction, precision teaching and milieu language training doesn't take into account analysis of verbal behavior a few comments I recently read on an parent internet list for with disabilities. Additionally again and again I have heard of clinicians in field and their new approach to verbal behavior. In meantime I see little about history of analysis or current work in this area of behavior. This does little justice to work of Vargas, Michael, Catania, Sidmund, Sundberg and countless less famous, but equally capable others who have contributed to our knowledge in analysis of verbal behavior. It seems to me to be no different when current analysts omit history upon which they base their current work to public and omission that Eshelman and Vargas speak about. …