BA200 Unit 6 Dimensions of ABA Paper Example

A Social Skills Group That Worked Only on Fridays: A BA200 Unit 6 Dimensions of ABA Paper

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

BA200: Conceptual Foundations of Applied Behavior Analysis

Unit 6 Dimensions of ABA Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The clinic, the program, the children and every figure are composite and illustrative; the sources cited are real.

The Program

My clinic runs a social skills group every Friday afternoon for six children aged six to eight. The group meets for ninety minutes and targets three skills: greeting peers by name, taking turns in a game, and asking a peer to play. Each session includes instruction, modeling by staff, practice with peers and reinforcement with tokens exchanged for a choice of activity. I have co-led the group for eight months and collected most of its data.

Baer et al. (1968) proposed seven dimensions that define applied behavior analysis: it should be applied, behavioral, analytic, technological, conceptually systematic, effective and capable of generality. Twenty years later, the same authors revisited the dimensions and found them still current, while emphasizing that applied work must solve problems that matter in people's real lives and must be judged by its effects in those settings (Baer et al., 1987). This paper evaluates the Friday group against each dimension.

Applied

A program is applied when the behaviors it targets are socially significant for the participants. Greeting peers, taking turns and asking to play are skills that affect whether children make friends at school, which parents listed as their top concern at intake. The program meets this dimension.

Behavioral

A program is behavioral when it measures what people actually do, not what they say they do or what observers infer. Each target skill is defined in observable terms; for example, a greeting is counted when a child says a peer's name and a greeting word within three seconds of the peer entering the room. Staff record each instance. The program meets this dimension.

Analytic

The analytic dimension requires a believable demonstration that the program caused the change. The clinic introduced the three target skills one at a time, in a multiple baseline across behaviors. Greetings rose only after greeting instruction began, turn-taking only after its instruction began, and so on. That pattern supports a causal claim within the group setting.

Technological

A program is technological when its procedures are described clearly enough that someone else could repeat them. The group has a written manual with session plans, scripts for modeling and rules for delivering tokens. A new technician joined in the spring and ran sessions with the same results. The program meets this dimension, and the manual has been updated twice as procedures changed.

Conceptually Systematic

Procedures should be tied to basic principles of behavior. The group uses modeling, prompting, differential reinforcement and token economies, each grounded in well-established principles. The manual explains the principle behind each step. The program meets this dimension.

Effective

A program is effective when the change is large enough to matter. In the group, the six children's average rate of peer greetings rose from about one per session to about seven, and turn-taking in games rose from about 40 percent of opportunities to about 85 percent. By the standard of the group setting, the effects are substantial.

The program's data are strong for Fridays at the clinic, which is exactly the problem: the children's friendships happen everywhere else.

Generality

Generality, the last dimension, requires that behavior change lasts over time, appears in settings beyond training and spreads to related behaviors. Here the program falls short. When parents and teachers completed short rating forms in the spring, five of six teachers reported no change in peer greetings at school, and only one child was reported to ask peers to play at recess. The skills appeared reliably in the clinic room, with the same peers and staff, and rarely elsewhere.

Baer et al. (1987) stressed that generality must be programmed rather than hoped for. Our group did nothing to arrange it: no practice in other settings, no involvement of school peers, no training of teachers to prompt or reinforce the skills.

One Child's Fridays and Mondays

The gap is easiest to see in one child. Eli, who is seven and has attended the group since it began, greets every peer by name within seconds of arriving on Fridays and earns his tokens for turn-taking without prompts. His mother told me that on Monday mornings at school he walks past the same kind of children without a word, and that his teacher described him as preferring to play alone. When I asked Eli about it, he said the school children "don't know the game." In one sense he is right. The clinic group gives him a familiar room, familiar peers, familiar adults who prompt and reward the skill, and a game he has played forty times. School provides none of those cues. From a behavioral perspective, the skill has come under the control of the clinic's stimuli and nothing else, which is a predictable outcome of training in only one setting.

Social Validity

Wolf (1978) argued that applied behavior analysis should measure social validity, meaning whether the people affected consider the goals important, the procedures acceptable and the results meaningful. Our parent ratings were a step in that direction, and they exposed the generality problem. When asked, parents rated the goals as very important and the procedures as acceptable, but rated the results as only somewhat meaningful, because they did not see the skills at home or school.

Recommendations

Three changes would address generality. First, add practice in natural settings, such as monthly sessions at a local park and, with permission, brief sessions at one child's school during recess. Second, include peers who are not in the group, such as siblings or classmates, so that skills are practiced with people children actually encounter. Third, train parents and teachers to prompt and reinforce the target skills, with a short guide and a phone check-in. The clinic should also measure generality directly, at least twice a term, using brief observations at school, rather than relying only on ratings.

Conclusion

The Friday social skills group meets six of Baer, Wolf and Risley's seven dimensions. It targets important skills, measures behavior, demonstrates control, is clearly described, rests on principles and produces large changes in the group. It fails generality, the dimension that determines whether the changes matter outside the clinic. The authors' 1987 reminder that generality must be programmed, and Wolf's case for asking families what matters, point to a program that practices friendship where friendships happen.

References

Baer, D. M., Wolf, M. M., & Risley, T. R. (1968). Some current dimensions of applied behavior analysis. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 1(1), 91-97. https://doi.org/10.1901/jaba.1968.1-91

Baer, D. M., Wolf, M. M., & Risley, T. R. (1987). Some still-current dimensions of applied behavior analysis. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 20(4), 313-327. https://doi.org/10.1901/jaba.1987.20-313

Wolf, M. M. (1978). Social validity: The case for subjective measurement or how applied behavior analysis is finding its heart. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 11(2), 203-214. https://doi.org/10.1901/jaba.1978.11-203