When I was a teenager, one of my go-to snacks was chopped chicken liver that my mom bought fresh from the Jewish deli. I would often sit with a large container of chopped chicken liver, crackers, and some pineapple juice and eat a ton of it. Several years later, I saw a can of chopped chicken liver while shopping. I thought, wow, I haven’t had this in years, so I bought a can to have as a treat. It was so horrible that I couldn’t eat any of it. Other chopped chicken liver fans have told me similar stories. It turns out that chopped chicken liver out of a can is not the same as chopped chicken liver freshly made. Later in life, I went almost completely vegetarian–although not because chopped chicken liver out of the can was so disgusting.
It is easy to get confused when things have the same name but are of dramatically different quality. Fresh chopped chicken liver is not the same as chicken liver out of a can. Some parents, teachers, and school district administrators have worked with BCBAs before and might have had a bad experience with low quality services. You have probably started new cases and heard things like this:
“We tried applied behavior analysis and it didn’t work.”
“We worked with Dr. X, BCBA-D and the behavior just got worse.”
“He wasn’t successful with the ‘my way’ program”
It could be that unusual circumstances prevented the child from being successful previously (e.g., medical issues). But it’s much more likely that this is a chopped-chicken-liver-out-of-a-can problem. In all likelihood the service that the person previously received was low quality. Although lots of people in the field are working on this problem, it is very hard to get good measurements to help people distinguish high-quality programs from low-quality programs.
The question now becomes how to show new clients that you are offering is different from what they have had before. There isn’t an easy answer to that question, but I think two things help tremendously. First, invite the person to watch sessions. Just seeing a couple of sessions can make a huge difference. Most people can see the difference between a high-quality and low-quality program relatively quickly. Second, make sure that the person notices the step-by-step progress that the child is making each session. When people see tangible evidence of a child’s success, they usually become a believer.