BA430 Unit 4 Indirect Assessment Paper Example

Three Raters, Three Functions: A BA430 Unit 4 Indirect Assessment Paper

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

BA430: Behavior Assessment

Unit 4 Indirect Assessment Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, the cooperative, the student, the raters and every score are composite and illustrative; the articles cited are real.

Why Start with Questions

Kou screams and sometimes hits staff during transitions at his elementary school, a two-room building in a valley south of Missoula. Before observing him systematically, my supervisor asked me to gather indirect assessment data from the adults who know him best. Indirect assessments are questionnaires, rating scales and interviews completed by people familiar with the person. They are quick, safe and cheap, which is why they are so widely used, and they can identify the situations and consequences to examine more closely.

I used two closed-ended tools and one open-ended interview. The raters were his classroom teacher, the paraprofessional who walks him to the bus, and his grandmother, with a trained interpreter for her responses.

The Motivation Assessment Scale

Durand and Crimmins (1988) developed the Motivation Assessment Scale, a sixteen-item questionnaire in which an informant rates how often a behavior occurs in specific situations. Items are grouped into four functions: sensory, escape, attention and tangible. The function with the highest mean score is taken as the likely maintaining variable. In their original study with children who engaged in self-injury, ratings showed good reliability and predicted behavior in analog conditions.

For Kou, the teacher's ratings pointed most strongly to escape: she noted that screaming was most likely when he was asked to stop an activity. The paraprofessional's ratings pointed to tangible: she noted that he often screamed when an item he was carrying had to be left behind. His grandmother's ratings pointed to attention, because at home he screamed when she was busy with his younger cousins.

Each rater was describing a real pattern; the scale simply could not tell me which pattern mattered at school.

The Functional Analysis Screening Tool

Iwata et al. (2013) evaluated the Functional Analysis Screening Tool, a sixteen-item checklist on which informants answer yes or no to statements about the conditions surrounding a behavior. They examined agreement between pairs of informants and compared the tool's results with those of functional analyses. Agreement between informants was moderate at best, and the tool's predictions matched functional analysis outcomes in a majority of cases but far from all. The authors concluded that the tool can help structure interviews and identify conditions to test, but its results alone cannot settle what maintains a behavior.

The teacher's and paraprofessional's answers on the screening tool agreed on most items, but both answered yes to items for escape and for tangible items. That overlap was informative: it suggested that the transitions where Kou screamed might involve both ending a preferred activity and giving up a preferred item, which were the same event from two angles.

Why Informants Disagree

Several factors explain the disagreement. Informants see the behavior in different settings: his grandmother sees him at home, where the routines and people are different. They see different parts of the same event: the teacher sees the demand to stop, and the paraprofessional sees the item being taken away. They also remember behavior selectively, recalling vivid episodes rather than typical ones. And closed-ended items require informants to judge how often something happens in conditions they may never have observed separately. None of this makes the informants wrong; it makes rating scales a poor tool for deciding function.

An Open-Ended Interview

Hanley (2012) argued that closed-ended indirect tools are often less useful than an open-ended interview in which informants describe specific episodes, what happens just before, what they do afterward and what seems to stop the behavior. He suggested that such interviews can identify the combination of conditions to test in a functional analysis, including the possibility that several reinforcers operate together.

I interviewed the teacher and the paraprofessional together and his grandmother separately with the interpreter. The joint interview produced a detailed description of a typical episode. At 11:50, the class lines up for lunch in the gym, which is loud. Kou is asked to put away the toy truck he carries from the morning circle, and the paraprofessional takes his hand to walk him. He screams, drops to the floor and sometimes hits. The episode usually ends when he is allowed to carry the truck to the gym, or when the class leaves and the room goes quiet.

His grandmother described a different picture at home: screaming when she turned to his cousins, ending when she picked him up. The interpreter noted that she used a Hmong word that means both crying out and calling for someone.

Interviewing Across Languages

The interview with Kou's grandmother needed more care than the school interview. Rating scale items such as "occurs when demands are placed" do not translate cleanly, and the interpreter warned me that some items would sound like accusations of poor parenting. We dropped the rating scale for her after the first attempt and kept to the open-ended questions, asking her to tell us about the last time Kou screamed at home and what happened next. Her answers were long and specific. She described the room, who was present and what she did with her hands. That detail would have been lost in a column of numbers, and it gave the team its only picture of Kou's behavior outside school. I also learned to schedule twice as long for an interpreted interview.

Turning Data into Hypotheses

Taken together, the indirect data supported three hypotheses for testing. At school, screaming during transitions may be maintained by keeping the preferred item, by avoiding the loud gym, or by both. At home, screaming may be maintained by attention from his grandmother. The school hypotheses would be examined first, through descriptive data and then, if needed, a functional analysis with my supervisor present.

Limits and Cautions

Indirect tools have a place. They are safe, involve the people who know the student, and can be completed in an afternoon. They also give families a voice early in the process, which matters for Kou's grandmother, who had never been asked about his behavior at school. But the evidence reviewed by Iwata and colleagues shows that their results should be treated as hypotheses. The danger is a plan built on a rating scale that happens to be wrong.

Conclusion

Three informants completing the same rating scale named three different functions for Kou's screaming. Durand and Crimmins's scale and the screening tool evaluated by Iwata and colleagues both reflected real patterns but could not settle which one maintained the behavior at school. Hanley's open-ended interview identified a combined hypothesis, keeping the toy and avoiding the noisy gym, which the next units would test directly.

References

Durand, V. M., & Crimmins, D. B. (1988). Identifying the variables maintaining self-injurious behavior. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 18(1), 99-117. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02211821

Hanley, G. P. (2012). Functional assessment of problem behavior: Dispelling myths, overcoming implementation obstacles, and developing new lore. Behavior Analysis in Practice, 5(1), 54-72. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03391818

Iwata, B. A., DeLeon, I. G., & Roscoe, E. M. (2013). Reliability and validity of the Functional Analysis Screening Tool. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 46(1), 271-284. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaba.31