Don Baer said something like, “Behavior Analysis is the process of changing complaints into behaviors to be changed, which if changed, will change the complaining behavior of the complainer.” That’s a pretty good simple description of the job of a BCBA. One of the key skills in behavior analysis is translating the initial complaint into a behavior to be changed.
Most of the time, this isn’t too big a problem. For example, when a parent reports “he is disrespectful,” we continue interviewing and observing until we can translate “disrespectful” into observable behaviors–hitting, kicking, screaming, or cursing. So far, so good.
That often works fine. In fact, translating complaints into observable behaviors is usually considered such a routine part of practice that many people don’t think new BCBAs need much training to learn to do it. But in my view, BCBA training programs should include instruction on this skill because while this is an easy task most of the time, it can be challenging in certain situations.
One common situation where BCBAs may have trouble translating the complaint into a behavior to be changed is teaching social skills. These skills are often subtle and complex and very difficult to translate into easily observable behaviors. Another difficult problem can involve staff management. We want staff to “show initiative,” “have a positive attitude,” or a hundred other fuzzy statements that aren’t easy to define.
This leads to a situation where we need to do something but don’t have a clear idea of the critical behaviors we should target. When this happens, BCBAs might sometimes resort to selecting targets that are easy to measure instead of what is critical. This obviously can lead to poor programming. In my view, Bob Mager wrote the best guide to this skill.