Choosing target behaviors for contingency analyses

Revised on 1/4/14

Take a look at an earlier post with the "Principles of Behavior: Ch. 02" label for tips about preparing the reinforcement CA. This post will elaborate on some of what was written there.

One of the most common errors that students make with CAs is in identifying the target behavior. Because the courses that use Malott's book focus on the basic behavioral contingencies, the examples of contingencies that you use in your CAs should use simple, discrete behaviors. "Discrete" means not consisting of multiple parts. So you should not use behaviors that are actually behavioral chains consisting of a sequence of connected behaviors. An example of a behavioral chain is baking a cake, which is not a discrete, unitary act, but several acts or behaviors performed one after the other until you're finished. You should not use any other "collection" of behaviors either. Doing your homework or cleaning up your room, for instance, are collections of separate behaviors, consisting of any number of individual behaviors. Often these collections of behaviors have other, unrelated, behaviors interspersed. So you might work for a while on your homework, or pick up a few things in your room, then take a break, get a bite to eat or go to the bathroom, then resume working on your homework or cleaning your room. Collections of behaviors like this don't work for the kinds of CAs we're doing. One of the reasons is that in this kind of situation, it's not possible to specify what is meant by "immediately following the target behavior."

The target behaviors you choose should have a clear starting point, a clear ending point, and between the starting and ending points there should be no interruption and no interspersed behaviors.

The one possible exception is the reinforceable response unit (RRU), which you can read about on p. 374. An RRU meets the criteria I just spelled out in the preceding paragraph, so it's acceptable. But if you specify an RRU as the target behavior in one of your CAs, be careful, because they're rare in real life, and your CAs need to be faithful to real life.