A Behavioral Community Approach to Community Health and Development: Tools for Collaborative Action

Researchers, scientists, and practitioners continue to advance behavioral community approaches for addressing community health and development issues. Applied behavior analysis (ABA) offers an important perspective for examining socially important problems and goals across a range of issues. Throughout an evolutionary process of selection, behavioral community scientists continue to focus on the dimensions of ABA (e.g., applied, behavioral, analytic, conceptually systematic, generalizable, effective, technological, or reproducible). The importance of integrating a behavior-analytic perspective to support behavioral community approaches has been promoted in other disciplines, including community psychology, public health, and prevention science. This chapter examines the history and current efforts to advance behavioral community approaches, interventions, and technologies that support community health and development. Efforts facilitated by the Center for Community Health and Development with the Department of Applied Behavior Science at the University of Kansas are featured to demonstrate an evolution and scaling of behavioral community research and application. Additional resources, frameworks, and tools that have guided the implementation of behavioral community research and practice in community health and development are presented. Through the chapter, the influence of behavioral community science and research within ABA and other disciplines is examined to better understand the importance of an integrated behavioral community approach.