Autism Behavioral Strategies: FBA vs. FA

Dr. Mary Barbera discusses autism behavioral strategies, specifically the Functional Behavioral Assessment (FBA), Functional Analysis (FA), and Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA).

There’s a lot of autism jargon out there, and you’ve probably heard me mention countless words related to autism and psychology. Today, I’m talking about the different ways for measuring problem behaviors and three behavioral intervention strategies: the FBA, FA, and ABA autism approaches. While these aren’t the only autism treatment strategies, they are among the most popular. Understanding these autism treatment methodologies will help you gauges the pros and cons of each when and if certain approaches are needed and improve your skills in analyzing problem behaviors.

Hopefully by the end of this video you’ll be able to understand the benefits of ABA for children with autism, as well as when to use functional analysis. I also share a great e-mail I got in this video about my approach to turning autism around, which adds on to what I said a couple weeks ago about how my approach is different.

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Dr. Mary Barbera. I fell into the autism world as an autism mom in 1999 when her first-born son, Lucas, was diagnosed with autism. Since then, she became a Board-Certified Behavior Analyst and best-selling author of The Verbal Behavior Approach. Since 2015, she’s created 3 autism online courses based on applied behavior analysis for professionals and "gung-ho" parents. Whether you’re looking for autism parenting strategies, working with development delays in children, or in search for autism help for professionals, I can encourage you to subscribe to the channel and join me on my journey. I’ll be providing weekly autism resources that you don’t want to miss!

[wolfbenson]

He said, , "Change something that I can see as a problem right away and move on." Task is probably too difficult. Change it. Probably too little reinforcement. Increase it. Well, you might get lucky. Task is too difficult, can you change it, "on the fly?" You can certainly increase reinforcement on the fly but the whole idea of "too little reinforcement" I find

[kylechina]

I’ve found that people often will report that a behavior is for escape in an interview or a screening but when pure escape is provided (without access to any subsequent R+) in an FA or it’s observed in event recording, the target Bx often persists because the individual is escaping to some form of R+ (wether that’s social or automatic). It’s rarely pure escape in my experience, unless it’s pain reduction or something like that. Also, is it just me or does “social negative” seem to be an oxymoron? You need someone (R+) to escape (R-). That’s always stuck in my craw.

[wolfbenson]

To continue as I hit the enter button below. To little reinforcement is way to general an explanation for increase or decrease in behavior. If only it were that easy. Give me ten dollars, give me a thousand, I don't want to shovel snow. Too little reinforcement is usually not the reason for behavior and won't help much with behavior change unless, and only if, you can determine with the particular behavior that reinforcement is, in fact, the problem. Behaviors are complicated, many faceted, and there's rarely a simple answer like decrease task difficulty or increase reinforcement. On the other hand, FA usually verify what most therapists, teachers already know. With non-verbal, low IQ children it may be a lot harder to determine, FA or no, what the function is. An FBA makes the teacher and mother feel like part of the team but I've found that preconceived notions of what the behavior is about, is often the finding on the FBA. They should do a study where teachers are told, "We think it's attention seeking, and another set of teachers, we think it's escape, with the same child, in the same environment, same task, etc. and see what their FBA suggests. I would bet that whatever they thought of before the FBA, they will "confirm" it after the FBA. PS. To do the "alone condition" you don't need a special room or place to conduct it. Just leave him
One final thing. Just a personal pet peeve: I hate the expression: "fulfill their potential." That is an oxymoron. "Potential" means that it isn't fulfilled. Sorry, just an annoying problem of mine.