Behavior Modification

Observing and Recording behavior

 Case # 1
A & B were having difficulties in their
marriage, because of frequent arguments.
Their marriage counselor arranged.

Behavioral contract
With them in which they agreed to do several nice things for
each other.
 Case # 2

 Client R. was engaged in pulling her hair instantly, as a

result she created a bald spot on the top of her head.
Although she knew the embarrassment of getting bald
spot but she continued.

 So she was instructed to engaging in competitive activity for

her. That decreased her hair pulling habit.
 Case # 3
 A boy F was putting lot of weight he joined a weight
loss group. At each group meeting he used to deposit
money. Set a goal for daily exercise.

So if he earned specified number of point he used to get

back the deposit money otherwise not.
• In these 3 cases you can notice that there is a
focused behavior and also a procedure to
change the behavior.
• So what do you think what is Behavior ?
• What is behavior modification?
 Behavior
 What people do and say.

Examples: running, walking, screaming, slamming the door,

head banging etc.

Do you think ?

• Anger
• Sadness
• Confusion is a behavior?
 Behavior Have one or more dimensions

that can be measured.

Physical dimensions :
–Frequency
–Duration
–Intensity

 Can be observed and recorded

 Have an impact on oneself/environment
 Lawful
–Systematically influenced by environment events.
 May be overt (observed) or covert (private event)
 What is that characteristic of behavior?

• An autistic child when receives higher

attention from the teacher, his disruptive
behavior decreases.
• When he receives low attention , disruptive
behavior increases.
 Which characteristics this??
Ex:1
•A person sits at his computer and types a
letter??
• Ex:2
• A little child lies in her crib and cries loudly.
Her mother then picks her up and feeds her?
• What does mean by?

Functional relationship between a disruptive

behavior and attention.
 OVERT/COVERT behavior

• Thinking is?
• Expression of anger is?
• Disruptive behavior?
 Behavior Modification/applied
behavior analysis
Field of psychology related to analysis and
modification of human behavior.
Identification of functional relationship
Environment and behavior are important
Developing and implementing procedures to
change behavior
 Cont… behavior modification
• Measurement of behavior change

• De emphasis on past events as causes of

behavior

• Rejection of hypothetical underlying causes of

behavior
– Freudian psychoanalytic
– Skinner’s “explanatory fiction’’
 Historical Roots of Behavior
Modification
 Ivan P. Pavlov (1849–1936)
– Basic processes of respondent
– conditioning

• Edward L. Thorndike (1874–1949)

– description of the law of effect.
 John B. Watson (1878–1958)

“Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It,”

published in 1913, stimulus–response
psychology in which environmental events
(stimuli) elicited responses.
• Watson started the movement in psychology
called behaviorism (Watson, 1913, 1924).
• B. F. Skinner (1904–1990) Skinner expanded
the field of behaviorism originally described
by Watson.
– Skinner explained the distinction between
respondent conditioning
 (the conditioned reflexes described by Pavlov and
Watson) and operant conditioning, in which the
consequence of behavior controls the future
occurrence of the behavior (as in Thorndike’s law
of effect).
 Characteristics of behavior
modification
• Focus on target behavior not on the label
– Behavioral excess
– Behavioral deficit
• Based on behavioral principle that are as a
result of experimental analysis
• Emphasis on current environmental events
• Precise description of procedure
• Implemented by person in daily life
 Areas of Application
• Developmental disabilities
• Mental illness
• Special Education
• Rehabilitation
• Community psychology
• Clinical psychology
• Business and human services
• Self management
• Child management
• Prevention
• Sports psychology
• Health related behaviors
• Sports psychology
• Gerontology (Nursing homes and other care facilities)
 Assessment

• Why behavioral assessment/measurement of

behavior is important?
 Measuring the behavior before treatment
provides information that can help you
determine whether treatment is necessary.

 Behavioral assessment can provide information

that helps you choose the best treatment.

 Measuring the target behavior before and after

treatment allows you to determine whether the
behavior changed after the treatment was
implemented.
Direct and Indirect Assessment
•Direct involves using interviews, questionnaires,
and rating scales to obtain information on the
target behavior from the person exhibiting the
behavior or from others (e.g., parents, teachers, or
staff).
•Indirect assessment does not occur when the
target behavior occurs but relies on an individual’s
recall of the target behavior.
 When a school psychologist observes a socially
withdrawn child on the playground and records
each social interaction with another child, the
psychologist is using direct assessment.

 When the psychologist interviews the student’s

teacher and asks the teacher how many times
the child usually interacts with other children on
the playground, the psychologist is using indirect
assessment.
Procedures of behavioral analysis

•Defining the target behavior

When two people independently observe the same behavior and both record that the
behavior occurred, this is called interobserver agreement(IOA) or interobserver reliability

• Determining the logistics of recording

•Choosing a recording method
• Choosing a recording instrument
• Direct assessment usually is more accurate
than indirect assessment.

• What kind of limitations can be there in

indirect method?
 The Logistics of Recording
The Observer
We have defined the target behavior to be recorded for
a client, that is, a person who exhibits the target behavior
and with whom the behavior modification program will
be implemented.
 The next step is to identify who will observe and record
the behavior.
 In a behavior modification program, the target behavior
typically is observed and recorded by a person other than
the one exhibiting the target behavior (i.e., an
independent observer).
• The observer may be a professional, such as a
behavior analyst or a psychologist, or a person
routinely associated with the client in the
client’s natural environment, such as a
teacher, parent, staff member, or supervisor.
• In some cases, the observer is the person
exhibiting the target behavior.

• When the client observes and records his or

her own target behavior, it is called self-
monitoring.
• In addition, the client might be asked to self-
monitor the target behavior outside the
therapy sessions.
• If self-monitoring is used in a behavior
modification program, the client must be
trained to record his or her own behavior in
the same way that an observer would be
trained.
 The observer records the target behavior in a specific
period called the observation period.
When and Where to Record
 It Observation and recording of behavior take place in
natural settings or in analogue settings.
 A natural setting consists of the places in which the target
behavior typically occurs.
 Observing and recording a target behavior in the classroom is an
example of a natural setting for a student
 Observing a target behavior in a clinic playroom is an analogue
setting because being in the clinic is not part of the child’s
normal daily routine.
 Observation of the target behavior can be structured or
unstructured.
 When observations are structured, the observer arranges
for specific events or activities to occur during the
observation period. For example, when observing child
behavior problems, the observer may ask the parent to
make specific requests of the child during the observation
period.
 During unstructured observations, no specific
events or activities are arranged and no instructions are given
during the observation period.
 Choosing a Recording Method

• continuous recording
• product recording
• interval recording
• and time sample recording.
Continuous Recording

• In continuous recording, the observer

observes the client continuously throughout
the observation period and records each
occurrence of the behavior.
– frequency, duration, intensity, and latency.
How does latency differ from duration?

•Latency is the time from some stimulus or

event to the onset of the behavior,
•whereas duration is the time from the onset of
the behavior to its offset.
• a real-time recording method in which the
exact time of each onset and offset of the
target behavior is recorded

• Real time recording can be carried out after

video recording the target behavior in the
observation period
 If you were recording a child’s tantrum behavior
(screaming, throwing toys, slamming doors), which
dimension of the behavior would you measure?
 The example of a child’s tantrum behavior is less clear.
You may be interested in the number of tantrums per
day (frequency), but you may also be interested in how
long each tantrum lasts (duration). Finally, you may be
interested in how loud the child screams or how
forcefully the child throws toys or slams doors
(intensity).
Unless you measure the right dimension of a
behavior, you may not be able to judge the
effectiveness of treatment.
Percentage of Opportunities
Percentage of trials or percentage correct is one
final way in which event recording may be
conducted.
In this method, the observer records the
occurrence of a behavior in relation to some other
event, such as a learning trial or a response
opportunity, and reports the results as the
percentage of opportunities in which the behavior
occurred.
 If the teacher made 12 requests and the
student complied with the teacher’s requests
11 times, the percentage of compliance is
11/12, or 92%.

 However, if the teachers made 25 requests

and the student complied 11 times, the
percentage is only 44%, a much less
acceptable level of the behavior.
Product Recording
 Another aspect of a behavior that may be
recorded is its product. Product recording, also
called permanent product recording (Marholin &
Steinman, 1977),
 a teacher could record the number of correctly
completed homework problems or workbook
pages as a product measure of students’
academic performance (Noell et al., 2000).
Interval Recording
 Another method for recording behavior is to record whether the
behavior
occurred during consecutive time periods.

the observer divides the observation period into a number

of smaller time periods or intervals, observes the client throughout
each consecutive
interval, and then records whether the behavior occurred in that
interval.

There are two types of interval recording:

 partial interval recording
 and whole interval recording.
With partial interval recording, you are not interested in the
number of times the behavior occurs (frequency) or how long
it lasts (duration).

–You do not have to identify the onset and offset of the

behavior; rather, you simply record whether the behavior
occurred during each interval of time.

Suppose that a teacher is recording whether a child disrupts

the class during each 15-minute interval in the class period.
The teacher sets a timer to beep every 15 minutes. When the
disruptive behavior occurs, the teacher marks the
corresponding nterval on a data sheet.

Once an interval is marked, the teacher does not have to

observe the child or record the behavior until the next interval
begins. If the behavior does not occur in an interval,
• presence or absence of the tic behavior.
• In some cases, frequency recording and
interval recording can be combined
• to produce frequency-within-interval
recording. With this method, the observer
• records the frequency of the target behavior
but does so within consecutive intervals
• of time in the observation period
 Time Sample Recording
 When using time sample recording, you divide the observation period into intervals
of time, but you observe and record the behavior during only part of each interval.
 The observation periods are separated by periods without observation. For
example, you might record the behavior for only 1 minute during each 15-minute
interval, or you might record the behavior only if it is occurring at the end of the
interval.
Consider an observer who is using time sample recording to record a client’s
poor posture (defined as slouching, bending the back forward). The observer
sets a timer to beep every 10 minutes and records an instance of bad posture only
if the client’s posture is bad when the timer beeps at the end of the interval. Time
sample recording is valuable because the person does not have to observe the
behavior for the entire interval.
 Choosing a Recording Instrument
 What the observer uses to register or make a permanent product of the
occurrence of the behavior.
 Paper and pencil
 data sheet prepared in advance for the particular behavior.

 The data sheet in Figure 2-5 is used to record the duration of a target
behavior.
On each day, there are places to record the times the behavior started
(onset)
and ended (offset). By recording the onset and offset of each instance of a
behavior,
you end up with a recording of how long the behavior occurred (duration), as
well as how often it occurred (frequency).
 Reactivity

Sometimes the process of recording a behavior causes the behavior to

change, even before any treatment is implemented. This is called reactivity
(Foster, Bell-
Dolan, & Burge, 1988; Hartmann & Wood, 1990; Tryon, 1998). Reactivity
may
occur when an observer is recording the behavior of another person or
when a
person engages in self-monitoring.

Reactivity may be undesirable, especially for research purposes, because the

behavior recorded during the observation period is
not representative of the level of the behavior occurring .
 Usually this change in behavior is only temporary, and the behavior returns to
its original level once the child becomes accustomed to the observer’s presence.
 One way to reduce reactivity is to wait until the people who are being observed
become accustomed to the observer.
 Another is to have the observer record the behavior without the people
knowing that they are being observed.
 This may be accomplished with the use of one-way observation windows or
with participant observers. A participant observer is a person who is
normally in the setting where the target behavior occurs, such as a teacher’s
aide in a classroom.
Likewise, when a person starts to record his or her own behavior as part of a
self-management project, the behavior often changes in the desired
direction as a result of the self-monitoring (Epstein, 1996). For this reason,
self-monitoring sometimes is used as a treatment to change a target
behavior.
 Interobserver Agreement

 You assess IOA to determine whether the target behavior is being

recorded consistently.
 To evaluate IOA, two people independently observe and record the same
target behavior of the same subject during the same observation period. The
recordings of the two observers are then compared, and a percentage of
agreement
between observers is calculated.
When the percentage of agreement is high, it indicates that there is
consistency in the scoring by the two observers. This suggests that the
definition of the target behavior is clear and objective, and that the
observers are using the recording system correctly. When high IOA is
reported in a research study, it suggests that the observers in the study
recorded the target behavior consistently.