Fundamental assessment

Functional assessment is an ongoing process collecting information to understand the reason under a problem or target behavior. The function of the assessment is to prove and aid the effectiveness of the interventions or treatments used to help eliminate the problem behavior. Through functional assessments we have learned that there are complex patterns to people's seemingly unproductive behaviors. It is important to not only pay attention to consequences that follow the behavior but also the antecedent that evokes the behavior. More work needs to be done in the future with functional assessment including balancing precision and efficiency, being more specific with variables involved and a more smooth transition from assessment to intervention. Functional assessment is an ongoing process collecting information to understand the reason under a problem or target behavior. The function of the assessment is to prove and aid the effectiveness of the interventions or treatments used to help eliminate the problem behavior. Through functional assessments we have learned that there are complex patterns to people's seemingly unproductive behaviors. It is important to not only pay attention to consequences that follow the behavior but also the antecedent that evokes the behavior. More work needs to be done in the future with functional assessment including balancing precision and efficiency, being more specific with variables involved and a more smooth transition from assessment to intervention. Functional assessment is a method developed by applied behavior analysis to identify the variables that maintain a problem behavior. Behavior is lawful. Whether it is desirable or undesirable, behavior is controlled by environmental variables. Behavior is a function of the antecedent and consequences that make up the three-term contingency. Functional assessment is the process of gathering information about the antecedent stimuli and consequences functional to the problem behavior. It attempts to provide an explanation to why the problem behavior may be occurring. The information about the antecedent stimuli may include the time and place, the presence of others and the frequency. The information collected helps identify which of the antecedent and consequences are maintaining the behavior. The information collected from functional assessment can also help develop appropriate treatments for the target behavior. Stimulus that may have been found to be reinforcing for the original behavior could be transferred to reinforce a more appropriate behavior. The purpose of conducting a functional assessment is to identify the function of the target behavior. There are four main classes of functions of problem behavior. Social positive reinforcement is when another person delivers a positive reinforcement after the problem behavior occurs. This is include the giving of attention, fun activities or goods and services provided by the person. An example of social positive reinforcement would be Max's mother (social) dropping what she is doing and provide attention (positive reinforcement) to her son when he engages in head banging on the wall (problem behavior). Social negative reinforcement is when another person delivers a negative reinforcement after the problem behavior occurs. The person may terminate an aversive stimuli (interaction, task or activity) and the behavior is more likely to be maintained. An example of social negative reinforcement would be Max complains (problem behavior) to his parents (social) when he is asked to do chores, as a result, his parents allows him to escape the task (negative reinforcement). Automatic positive reinforcement is when a positive reinforcement occurs automatically and is not mediated by another person. The behavior is strengthened by an automatic reinforcing consequence. An example of automatic positive reinforcement would be an autistic child waving his hands in front of his face (problem behavior) because the sensory stimulation (automatic positive reinforcement) produced is reinforcing for the child. Automatic negative reinforcement is when a negative reinforcement occurs automatically reducing or eliminating an aversive stimulus as a reinforcing consequence of the behavior. A popular example of automatic negative reinforcement would be binge eating. Binge eating (problem behavior) had been found to temporarily reduce any unpleasant emotions the person may be experiencing before the binge (automatic negative reinforcement). There are various different methods used to conduct functional assessment, all of which falls into three distinct categories. Indirect functional assessment methods use behavior interviews or surveys to gather information about the person exhibiting the behavior from themselves others who know this person well. The main advantage of indirect methods is they are easy and cheap to conduct and do not take much time. The main disadvantage of indirect methods is that the people involved are relying on their memories, thus some information may be lost or inaccurate.