Assigment .Apa seven . All instructions attached.

[music playing] STEVEN LITTLE: How do we observe behavior in a systematic way so that we have reliability across settings in time? OK. First, I want to talk about observations. What do we do when we do an observation? I mean, we're always observing, but we don't always observe in a systematic manner. So I'm going to talk about methods of observation. Going to talk about some very specific ways in which we, as behavior analysts, conduct observations, or how we sample behavior. Going to talk about reliability of observations, and we're going to end up then how we calculate into rate of reliability. So what you're going to learn today and what you've learned in your readings this week and in your assignments is very important. It's important right now, because a lot of what I'm going to talk about today is going to help you in your weekly assignments and doing some of the observations that you're going to be doing. But in the long run, it's going to help you, each one of you, in your practice as a behavior analyst. It's fundamental that we do accurate, reliable behavioral observations, and we've talked before on how important they are and why they're important. Now we talk a little bit more about how we do it, what exactly we do to get to the point of having good, reliable behavioral observations. You're going to be doing systematic behavioral observations in your assignments. And the way I have structured the assignments is that one assignment is going to build on another, so they are going to take you in a sequential fashion from some of the more general observational strategies to more specific observational strategies. And eventually, you're going to use the data that you have collected from these assignments to do a functional assessment, an initial functional assessment. So let's get started. Now, this is another area that I find very exciting, but then, I find about everything in here very exciting. Now I hope you're going to enjoy yourselves today, and you find this interesting and that my lectures aren't getting too tedious for you. So let's start off by talking about observations. And I mentioned, when we first started talking about observations, that-- in a previous week-- that it would be ideal if we could do continuous observations, be that proverbial fly on the wall. That we could observe in the natural environment and we could see everything that happens. Maybe we could have a little drone flying around following somebody. No, that's not possible either. It's really impossible for us to see the behavior of the individuals with whom we work in every context and see every behavior, every person with whom they interact on a continuous basis. We just can't do it. Be great if we could. If we had some sort of thing that could follow them around and record everything, but even then, it would be so difficult and tedious to go through it all to see everything. So it's really not possible, and even with advances in technology, it doesn't even seem to be remotely possible even in the future. It would just be to intrusive on anybody. So what we try to do is get a representative sample of the individual's behavior. We try to select times, we try to select environments so we can get observations that we can generalize to their overall functioning, their overall behavior. What we want to do when we're collecting these data-- and remember, I said systematic behavioral observations. What we want to do is we want to maintain some sort of consistency and be systematic throughout all of the observations. If we, for example, we look at things from baseline to intervention to a follow up phase after the intervention, if we change the manner in which we are doing an intervention-- sorry, an observation, then how are we going to know if our intervention worked? So we have to use the same procedures so that we have reliability across time, that our observations are measuring what we want to measure. So we may pick different times of day. I'll do an observation in the morning. Say they're in school, I'll do an observation in the morning. Do an observation in the afternoon. Different classes to see if the behavior is consistent across classes. So settings, we're looking at the different settings. Inside the school, in the lunchroom, in-- on the playground, those type of things. We want to see if there are any fluctuations that we can see in their behavior based on time of day, setting. And believe me, more than I can possibly tell you how many times it's happened, you see differences in behavior, especially in children that go to different teachers. From teacher to teacher, you'll see different behavior in different classrooms. You'll see much different behavior on the playground than you may see, obviously, in the classroom. But even day to day, depending on who's there and what's going on, in the lunchroom, so on, you'll see different behaviors based on other variables. And that's what we want to do if we want to be able to make those determinations. So we select times a day, and we want to see consistency. In most cases, you do see consistency. Although many times, you'll see inconsistency, and then you'll want to look at the different environments and say, OK, why are they behaving differently? Why is the rate of this behavior different in this environment than in that environment? And if it's two classrooms for example, what may be the difference between the teaching styles of the teachers? What about the environment of the classroom? The seating configuration, the person that's sitting next to the child. There's so many different things that we can look at. So recognize all of those factors that come into doing an observation. OK. Now, I want to start off talking about observations by talking about problems with observations. I find it good to go into the problems that we have before we talked about the actual methods that we use, because if you're aware of the problems, then you may be able to fix your procedures to counteract those problems. So let's talk some about the problems that may arise when you're doing systematic behavioral observations. I want to start with reactivity. Now, reactivity is simply the fact that your presence as an observer can change the individual's behavior. Your presence, for example, in a classroom, may change the dynamics in that classroom, changes the way the classroom may function. I'll give you some examples of that do that in a couple of minutes, but now, I think this is especially true when you are doing classroom observations. Because having a stranger, especially with younger children who may get used to the comfortable nature of the same children and the same teacher, maybe a teacher's aide, in the classroom, your coming in there changes those dynamics, changes the structure of things. So that alone-- doesn't have to do with you per se, but just the fact that you are somebody different coming into there. So let me tell you some experiences that I've had. And I've done this for many, many years. But give you an example in a school. I'll knock on the door, knock, knock, knock. Teacher comes to the door, and lets us-- we're assuming this is the class. I'm not sure exactly who I'm observing. What I'd like to do when I'm doing an observation, especially in a school, is to do an observation prior to my initial encounter directly with the student, directly with a child. So the child is-- you know, sometimes they may be expecting you or somebody have their parents told them, oh, there's going to be a psychologist, there's going to be a behavior analyst that's going to be coming in and doing an observation. They may remember that, they may not, but in most cases they probably are not aware originally that somebody going to come in the classroom to observe them, so that's not going to be specific to them that they're going to be responding, just to your general presence. But you know, I knock on the door. Teacher comes over, and let's say I don't know what this child looks like. So I'm going to say, as quietly as I can, you know, I'm here to observe Mitch, OK? Let's just say-- we're just taking that name at random. I'm here to observe Mitch. And now could you-- I'm saying this to the teacher-- could you, as unobtrusively as possible, just let me know which one is Mitch. Sometimes I know what the kid looks like, but a lot of times, I don't. So and I ask the teacher, do it as unobtrusively as possible. It seems, without fail, the teacher will go, there he is! Will point right to the child or will say in a loud voice, he's in the third row, second desk, or something along those lines. So my attempt to be as unobtrusive as possible, for the child not to know that I'm there to observe him or her-- usually a him. It's just a fact. I'll talk about some gender differences later. But the my cover is just coming into-- is kind of blown. I also tell the teacher, you know, just pretend I'm not here. Just try to react. And so many times a teacher said, OK, Dr. little is going to sit at the back of the classroom, ignore him. Now, can you ignore somebody? Especially when somebody tells you don't ignore. No. Your first tendency is to then go-- [gasping] You know, and sometimes it'd be somebody in a classroom, I may have seen another child in the classroom. That kid's going, hi, hi hi! So I'm disrupting the flow of the classroom and there's nothing I can do, but I try as much as possible to do it unobtrusively. I've even done times when I've gone outside, in a single story school, and tried to look in the window. Although, too often, somebody sees, there's some guy out there looking at a window! And that blows that and it makes things even worse sometimes, but I have done that when I thought there was no other way around it. But if someone tells you ignore something, you can't. Let's just say I say to you, right now, I don't want you to think about pink elephants. Wipe that out of your mind. Any conceptualization of pink elephants, forget about it. My guess is you all right now have some sort of image of a pink elephant in your mind and-- because you can't help it. So if you tell somebody to ignore something, it brings attention to it and it doesn't happen. OK. So all of those things could happen when you're doing an observation. I do have notes down here, so you'll see me flipping every now and then. Even though I know this stuff backwards and forwards, I still need to have some structure to go by. So all of that is happening in the classroom. So then I go back to the back of the classroom, and especially if they have them in a kindergarten classroom or first grade classroom, they got little tiny chairs. And so you can't really tell it here, I'm around six feet tall, I'm not a small man. Those chairs are really tiny. I'm there, my knees are in my face, and the metal clipboard and I'm doing things. And so you can see that the key thing that I want to get across here is that my presence in that classroom can be messing up the behavior, so I may not be able to get a representative sample simply because of my presence, because my presence has changed that classroom. So how do we get over that? Well, one way to do it is by becoming a participant By that, I mean that you actually become a part of the classroom or part of the environment. You are illusory activity, because they're used to seeing you there. So how do you do that? Well, I'm going to give you an example, and this goes back to the 1980's when I was working in South Louisiana. In fact, I was doing my internship at St. Bernard Parish Schools just south and east of New Orleans, and as an intern, I had a-- I was still given schools in which I was responsible-- for which I was responsible. And one of these schools, a friend of mine had worked in that school as the school psychologist the previous year, and he told me that this one teacher, Miss so-and-so-- I can't even remember her name, it's been a while-- but he said, she will-- she's impossible to work with. She doesn't do anything you ask. She is just difficult. So I made it my objective to work well with this teacher. And I knew Andy, the guy who was there before, and you know, he could be a little bit on the know-it-all side, so I thought I could get along. I didn't necessarily have-- was gonna have the same problems he had. But what I decided to do was when I went to the school-- and I went to the school one day a week-- was that I was going to become a part of this teacher's classroom, that I was going to do what I could do to help the teacher any way that I could. Not only would I get the teacher on my side-- and the interesting thing was that it worked tremendously, because I made some of the same recommendations that Andy had made the previous year to this teacher and she-- and I still remember an exact quote from her, she says, why couldn't Andy tell me things like this? And I had the records, I know Andy had told her the exact same thing, but I had a good relationship with her, he didn't. But we're here talking about being a participant observer. So anyway I went to this class, and it was a non-categorical pre-school handicapped class. Now, in Louisiana at that time-- I'm not sure if they're still doing it-- they did not provide categorical classifications for individuals under the age of six. So it didn't matter if you thought the person was ASD, you thought the person was ID, the person had a speech problem. It didn't matter, they were all given this non-categorical classification, for very good reason, and that was that they didn't want somebody to be tied to a label, a classification if they could focus on addressing the individual's needs and possibly make them capable of entering first grade when they would turn six years-- when they were six years old. So from that perspective, it was great. So they took individuals-- it was a classroom had eight to 10 students. And I knew I was going to be working with a large number of them, so it was nice being able to go in and spend some time in that classroom. As I said, it was at my internship, I didn't have quite as heavy a load-- workload, so I had the flexibility. So I went to that school one day a week. In that one day, I'd spend usually an hour to an hour and a half just in that classroom. For the first month or so of school, all I did-- I wasn't doing any specific work with any specific child-- I just went to the classroom and I helped any way I could. I sat-- sometimes I just sat there and watched. Sometimes I worked with an individual child who the teacher asked me if I could do something. I did story time. I sat there and read stories to the children. Occasionally, a teacher was-- there was a woman teacher and a little boy needed to go to the restroom, and she'd ask me if I'd take him, that type of thing. It was-- basically, I was just there. I guess you could say I was working kind of like as a teacher aide in the classroom. And I did that, you know, I said, for four weeks, and what I became was part of that class. Not only did it help me in my relationship with that teacher-- and I had some incredible things accomplished that year in that classroom with those children, because the teacher was on my side, because she knew I was on her side-- but it also gave me the opportunity to go into that classroom at any time and not be out of place they were used to seeing me there. And it worked incredibly well. So when I had to do a systematic behavioral observation, I did not affect the behavior of anyone in that classroom, because they were used to me. I was a participant. You can't always do that. In most, cases you don't. Although, as a behavior analyst, you may be in some classrooms enough that you just become a regular part of that environment, especially if it is in a special school type of environment, you will have the opportunity to spend a lot of time in individual classrooms. So you may become part of it, and you can get good observations. Now, you can't do that, another thing you can do is to get somebody to collect the behavior for you, do the observation for you, I should say. And I do apologize for me messing up a little bit, but I said, I'm doing this live. We're not editing these. What you see is what you get. Kind of like what you'd get in a land based university if you were in sitting in a classroom listening to someone give you a lecture. You can have the teacher, you could have the teacher aide. If it's in a home, you can have the parent. Have them collect the behavior for you. That sounds great, but there are problems there. Those-- that individual is not reactive, because they're in the classroom all the time, or the parent the home all the time. But they usually have their hands full. They can't sit down for a half hour and 45 minutes, an hour and do a systematic behavioral observation just because you need it. No, they are busy. They have things to do. Teacher aide also has other things to do. They may have a little bit more flexibility in their time, but you'd probably spend a lot of time having to train the teacher aide how to do a systematic behavioral observation. So it's not always feasible. Parents, they have other things to do, and plus, they're not necessarily going to give you an objective measure of the behavior. So when I use a teacher, when I use somebody else to collect the data for me, I try to keep it as simple as possible, and I try to do it on a relatively low frequency behavior, such as say aggression. Aggression, even if it happens once a day, once a week, can be a major problem, but it's relatively easy for the teacher-- they may have to fill out an incident report anyway-- is to do things like that. I'm going to talk about permanent products later on. If a teacher can collect permanent products, that's something that could be used. But it is an option. It reduces the reactivity when it can be used. Now, a third way is to actually have the person themselves collect the data for you. Hm. Couple problems with that. One is you can't do this with the younger children or with individuals that have any type of more serious disability. They just lack the cognitive capabilities to do it, or sometimes just the behavioral control, the maturity to be able to do that. Most of all, it's a developmental issue. They're just not able to effectively monitor their own behavior. Now, if you have someone, an adolescent, and it's something that they may-- is relatively easy for them to do it, you may be able to do it. But in most cases, having the clients, especially the clientele that we as behavior analysts work with, it's not that likely that you're going to use self observation. But one other problem if you could use it is that sometimes the act of recording your own behavior changes your behavior. It actually has a treatment effect. For example, let's just say that-- I've given dieting examples before. Let's say that you wanted to go on a diet, and as part of that diet, you're asked to record all the calories that you eat in the day. It's relatively simple. Not that obtrusive, although it can be. But you get something and you go, oh, that cookie looks really good, but that cookie has 500 calories. Do I really want to write down that I just had 500 calorie cookie? Non-nutritive, really doesn't keep me healthy. Maybe it's bad for me. Messes up my diet for the day. No, you may not, and you might be active, having to record it, you may say, you know, I don't need that cookie. I don't want that cookie right now. I don't want any type of snack right now, or maybe I'll have some-- I'll have a celery stick or carrot. You modify your behavior based on the fact that you have to record it. Now, you know, we're not going to deal with that many individuals as behavioral analysts that that's a problem, but that can be a problem, so keep that in mind. So it can work from a treatment perspective, but hey, it's not necessarily going to give you the most accurate data. A fourth way is doing an analog observation. Analog is just some sort of laboratory or contrived setting in which you observe behavior. It could be used very effectively. You can present certain stimuli you want to see the individual interact with. You can set up a scenario between a parent and a child which makes certain behaviors more likely. But in a lot of cases, we're not going to have this opportunity to observe somebody in an analog setting. Let me give you an example. You know, early in my career, I worked for a year at Children's Hospital in New Orleans. Wonderful environment, and you know, I loved it. And I ended up going to academia, but if I not-- had not, I probably would have worked in some sort of pediatric setting such as that. Wonderful place to work, if you ever get the opportunity, and they need behavior analysts desperately in a lot of these environments. So keep that in mind too as you go on and you get your PCBA. But what we did, we-- I worked both in the-- excuse me for a second. I worked both inpatient and outpatient. Inpatient I was working primarily in pediatric oncology. That's not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the outpatient part. In the outpatient part, we dealt primarily with younger children. At least my caseload was all preschoolers and early elementary school children. And then the parent-- it's usually just the mother-- would come in with the child. And we had a nice environment with a couch and chair. In the corner, there was a toy box and a bunch of different toys in it. And I brought-- I usually brought the mother and the child into that room. I did my traditional, typical, you know, interview in which I try to get an idea of the behavior and get the parents reporting of the incidents of the behavior and try to get an operational definition of the behavior, get background information, developmental history, those types of things. But now I also have an idea of what the behavior is. But because we're dealing with a parent and young child, I want to see the general interactional behaviors. So I would say, you see that mirror up there on the wall? Well, I'm going to go behind that mirror and I'm going to observe you. Didn't try to hide the fact that I'd be observing them. When you're observing parents like that, if you want to see how they're reacting, how they're responding, if they lack certain skills, they're not going to be able to fake it. They can try for a little while, but you do it for, you know, even 10, 15 minutes and you usually start seeing their behaviors that you're more likely to see in the naturalistic environment. So I'd be observing and I'd have them play, the parent playing with the child. And what I-- the typical thing, one of the parents would be overly directive. They wouldn't let the child play and then just join in. They would tell the child what to do and all that. They want to make-- they thought that would make them look good. But it gave me some information to go on. But some of the things that I've seen, you'd be amazed. I've seen a parent slap the kid across the face. And not just a little tap, but a real whack across the face. Of course, with that, I immediately intervened in that case. But it was an analog setting, and I was able to get an idea. The only other thing I could have done would have been to go to the home and try to see their behavior in the home, but there's a lot other things going on. So all of those things helped me get an idea of the parent child interactional style and how the parent reinforced the child, how the parent may punish the child. You may get that if you're working-- especially if you're working in a more residential facility or a day treatment center and not in a regular school. You don't generally get that opportunity in a regular school. But as a behavior analyst, you have opportunities to work in places where you may get this opportunity. But most of the time, we don't. Most of time, it's going to be us doing the observation, and we have to just try to minimize the reactivity as much as possible. So let's say we're doing an observation, or anybody is doing the observation, another issue we have to think about, and I mentioned this last week, is observer drift. And this is something that comes from a social psychological research. We've known it for decades. Actually, decades and decades. That when we observe something over time, we tend to change. We drift. We become less focused on the definition of the behavior. And in most cases, we become more lenient, and what-- during the first few minutes we say oh that was definitely [inaudible] of the behavior. Later on we become more lenient, and we don't record things as stringently. This is a tendency that is pretty much universal. We have to guard against observer drift. We have to be careful not to change our criteria of what the behavior is. We have to remain focused on the operational definition of the behavior. So sometimes with a recording, we see a change that looks like they're changing for the better, that they're getting better over time within the observational session, but in reality, it's just that the observer is changing that criteria over the observational setting, over time. Something that you need to be aware of and guard against. Now, a fourth problem in observation systems is complexity. And I mentioned this before, I mentioned it last week, about KISS, keep it simple stupid. The simplest explanation is usually the best. The same thing goes with observational systems. The simplest one is usually the best. The more complex you make the system, the more likely you are to make errors. Now, there are behavioral coding systems out there. They've been developed for all sorts of purposes. You can find them in books, you can find them online. You can purchase some of these really complex ones with a computer, on your iPhone, you can do it on your computer. Very complex systems that have multiple behaviors and looking for multiple antecedents and consequences. But you need a lot of training to do those. And also, the more complex they are, the more training you need. But even with the training, the more likely you are to make a mistake. The more likely you are to miss some of the things. So the more you put into an observational system, the more likely you are to make an error. The more behaviors that are involved in an observational system, the more likely you are to make an error. So keep it as simple as you can. If you can narrow it down specifically to one behavior which is well defined, operationally defined, that's concise and clear, that's easy to understand, that's easy to see, the better you are, you're less likely to make errors. And the final thing, the final problem I want to talk about right now is expectancy. One thing we know in psychology is that we have-- and people overall, not just psychologists, not just behavior analysts, but people in general have a strong confirmatory bias. When you know what the problem is, you know what you're looking for, then you're more likely to see it. If you have knowledge of a child, especially their behavior, you may see things that you wouldn't if you were just doing a regular observation. We see what we want to see sometimes. This happens a lot of times. I can give you an example. This goes back to actually my wife's dissertation, and she was collecting data. This is when I was on the faculty at the University of Alabama, and it was in a rural school district outside Tuscaloosa. And she was doing-- she actually had two groups that were a group that was defined by the teacher as well-behaved students and another group that were defined by the teacher as less well-behaved, and she collected data. She recorded data over a long period of time. I won't go into details of what she was looking for, but the key thing that we noticed is that the problem behaviors of the so-called problem behavior students didn't differ that much. The teacher was ignoring any type of problem behavior in what she called good students, and she was jumping on and focusing on the problem behavior in those that she had deemed as the problem behavior students. So in essence, she was expecting to see it in these students and she saw it. She wasn't expecting to see it in these other students, so she didn't see it. So when we did the observations, and I helped her do the observations from the videotape-- yes, in those days, it was the actual tape-- we saw those differences, but the teacher thought for sure this group didn't do it, this group did. But in reality, they both did it. So it was very, very interesting, but you see that all the time. I'll give you another example. One other place where I used to work, at a university in the Midwest where in this town, in the hospital there, they had an ADHD clinic, and this was back in the '90s when things ADHD was really becoming more and more prevalent and they had this clinic. Now granted, you're not going to go to the clinic unless you think somebody has-- you have ADHD, but I do not know, and I lived there for four years, I do not know a single individual who went in for an evaluation from that clinic who did not come out with a diagnosis of ADHD and a prescriptulin-- a prescriptulin? A prescription for Ritalin, and that was the primary drug that was used at the time. They-- we now have other stimulant medications that are used, but Ritalin was the primary drug of choice for ADHD then. Everybody who went into that clinic for an evaluation came out with that, because that's what they were looking for. I can give you many, many other examples. But if you're looking for something, you're more likely to see it. And it's going to affect your observations. So we need to be aware of these things. We can't eliminate them totally, but we need to be aware of things like drift, we need to be aware of things about confirmatory bias so that we do as an objective an observation as possible, and the best way to do that is to have a well-defined target Now, last week, I talked some about recordings, and I talked about frequency measures. Well, the simplest measure is a simple frequency measure. We call it event recording, because we're recording events. Now, the best way to do this with the best behaviors, and I said, I mentioned this last time, is to have a free operant. In other words, a behavior that has a clear beginning, it has a clear end. We measure how often it occurs. We get the rate of that behavior. Another way we can do things is just doing some sort of discrete characterization. Either the behavior's occurring, the behavior is not occurring. You just mark down whether it occurs, whether it doesn't occur. That's also used in how we sample behavior, because in most cases, we're going to do some sort of sampling. Not try to get all the instances of the frequency of a behavior, but rather, we're going to get some sort of sampling of the behavior. And most likely, we're going to be doing time sampling. Now, time sampling means-- does not mean that we're sampling time, not time of day. We're sampling behavior, it's just that we're doing it on some sort of time schedule. So it's called time sampling. Sampling behavior on some sort of time schedule. Now I'll go into different types as more detail as we go on, because these are the things you're more likely-- you're most likely going to be doing in your work as a behavior analyst. You'll be observing in a systematic way using some sort of time sampling procedure. Now, we frequently do interval recording. When we do interval recording, we're generally using either a whole interval or a partial interval. Now, a whole interval-- now let's just say you have 15 second intervals. You're going to observe the behavior for 15 seconds. Whole interval recording means that the behavior, of the target behavior occurred the entire 15 seconds of that observational period. If the person paused for one second and didn't exhibit that behavior for a short period of time, you don't record it as that interval having the behavior. The behavior has to be occurring from the beginning of the interval to the end of the interval. If it did not occur at any time during that interval, we don't record it as occurring. We don't use this as much, and you can probably figure out why. I'll go back to this in a little bit. I going to talk about partial interval recording, which is what we're more likely to use. Now, partial interval recording means that the behavior occurred at some time during that interval. So again, let's say we have a 15 second interval. If that behavior occurred at one time, if we're talking about out of seat behavior, for example. If at any time during that 15 seconds-- so the interval starts now. Person leaves their seat. They come back I left my seat. Most of that 15 second interval, I'm still here. I just left for a very short period of time, but doesn't matter. Any time during that interval, for however long it happens during that interval, you are recording it as having occurred. So generally, what we do in the time sampling procedure is we have a period of time that we break into, observe, and record intervals. For example, if you're going to be-- one of the more common things that I do, and I'll talk about this in more detail a minute, is do something like a 15 second observe, five second record. 15 second observe, five second record. So in essence, in a one minute period of time, you have 3 observation periods, three 15-minute intervals in three five-minute recording times. So I'll get to that in more detail in just a minute, because I want to talk about another time sampling procedure that I use that I like much more than whole or partial interval, and that's called momentary time sampling, where you have a specific behavior-- or just momentary time sampling is exactly what it says. You're looking at a moment in time, and is that behavior recurring in that period in time? So instead of having a 15 minute observe time, let's just say we have 15 seconds, and we just look at our watch, our stopwatch, whatever we're looking at, and 15 seconds-- we look down, and every 15 seconds you look up. If the child is engaging in that target behavior at that time that you look up, then you record it as happening during that 15 minute session. If the behavior is not occurring when you look up, you don't record. So you just look back down again and you look for 15 seconds after the first 15 second interval started. So it's [inaudible]. You know, basically, you have a second hand, an old type of watch, you can just do it that way. If you have a little digital watch, I usually would start it at zero, just looking at the-- or a stopwatch. I just look at every 15 30, 45, 60. So you're getting four observations in an hour. All you're doing is, does it happen at that time. I'll get back to these and give you some recommendations in a little bit, because the next thing I want to talk a little bit about is duration recording. Duration recording. I think I mentioned this last week also. It's also a time sampling procedure. Now I'm going to give you a hint on your assignment. You're not going to do a duration recording, OK? You're going to want to do some sort of time sampling procedure, but not a duration recording. The duration recording is simply how often something happens. Let's just say you record for an hour. You have a stopwatch. I'm going to go back to any type of stop-- you have a stopwatch on your phone. Sure you have one on your phone. So you just look at that, and all you're doing is that you can start, you can stop, you can start again. You don't want to reset, you just start it. You start with the hour and you see the behavior, you hit your start on your stopwatch. And then when something happens, you stop it. Happens again, you start it. So you're getting a cumulative recording of how long a time, during that hour, the overall observation session, how many times you-- or how much time, I should say, you have-- not how many times, not how many incidents, but just the overall-- just off task behavior. They're not paying attention to the teacher. Let's just say Rod. Rod was off task 37 out of 60 minutes. So you get that measure. That's a duration recording. All you're doing is recording how often it happened. Let me go to another one, latency recording. I think I mentioned this last week too. Now latency recordings are simply the time from a stimulus, say a parent telling the child to do something-- or just say the parent telling the child, look at me, and how long did it take that child to respond and actually look at the time. So we're looking time from stimulus to response, and that's it. That's a latency recording. Another method of observation is permanent product observation. Permanent products are just some outcome of the behavior. Depending on what-- not all behaviors have an outcome, but if they do have a permanent product outcome-- turning in homework. If you're looking at actually doing class work, how many math problems, for example, did they-- did they do on a worksheet? Those are permanent products that you can sample behavior. You can see how much they did simply by that. It allows-- it's a more general type of thing, but allows you to get a clear measure of how the individual is doing. Now, I use permanent products usually in conjunction with other things. I want to still get a frequency of the behavior somehow, be it a time sampling procedure, a frequency procedure, whatever, but I supplement it with some sort of permanent product. Another type of recording, which we're going to talk about in more detail, sometimes called an ABC recording. And you're going to have to do one in the coming week. In order to do a functional assessment, a functional analysis, you're going to have to do it. Now, ABC-- and you're going to see-- I've already given you an ABCD thing last week, informing objectives. Well, this ABC is a little bit different. This ABC is starting with the A, the antecedent, what happens immediately before the behavior. The B, the behavior itself, the target behavior that we've defined. And C, the consequence, what happens after the target behavior is exhibited. You're going to get an idea of what is controlling the behaviors, what is [inaudible] stimulating the behavior or triggering the behavior, the antecedent, and what is coming up is being one of the functions of the behavior. Are they being positively reinforced? Are they being negatively reinforced? Remember, if a behavior occurs multiple times, it has to be positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, or some type of automatic reinforcement. But it's a reinforcement, because the behavior is occurring more than once. So it's recurring-- happening on a recurring basis. Excuse me for one second. So again, we're looking for the patterns here. We'll see later on that we talk about doing this in the context of doing a functional assessment. There are different ways to do it, and there are different ways that I do it. What I usually do first is just do an observation-- I just do a narrative recording of the behavior. I just try to write down what's happening. I don't try to do anything formally, just to get some ideas, but it gives me an idea of what patterns I may be looking for to do a little bit more systematic observation later on. If it's the first time you do it, you're going to get an idea of possible antecedents, possible triggers. And I told you, in classrooms, I tell teachers to keep an eye out for the gators, the instigators, because something is triggering the behavior. Behavior doesn't occur just randomly, it needs some sort of trigger to bring it on. What are the triggers? And how are others in their environment? How the teacher? How are the other students in the classroom? How are the parents? Whoever it is, how were they responding to it? So those are the types of things you can get at. You can get an idea of it so you know better what to look for. And we'll talk about this in greater detail when we go into functional assessment. But by doing a general narrative observation, I can generally narrow it down, so when I do a more systematic ABC type of observation, I kind of know what I'm looking for. See, expectancy is not bad. You had to guard against confirmatory bias, but having an expectancy and knowing what you're looking for, as long as you don't overgeneralize what you're looking for, can be good. Now let me give you an example. You're looking for A, the antecedent, B, the behavior, and C, the consequence. OK, there's a classroom discussion. A, the antecedent. The teacher poses a question to the class. B-- now remember, it's going to be focused on your target child, and let's just say your child-- the child raised his hand to be called upon to answer the question. So it can be a good behavior. Not all problem behaviors. And C, the teacher said, Johnny, that was very good. What is the answer? Johnny answers. The teacher, again, reinforces the child. Consequence, social praise for reinforcement. This is just a very basic example. Antecedent, the teacher's prompt, asking the question. The behavior, in this case, a good behavior, raising their hand. And C, positive reinforcement for raising the hand, answering the question. But the child is responding to the antecedents. The teacher is reinforcing that behavior, so you'd expect that when the teacher ask questions and the child has the answer in the future that the child may be more likely to raise his or her hand. Now, things don't always happen so nice, neatly, and cleanly as the example that I just gave you. It takes a lot of training to look for these-- look at these things. Sounds simple. Putting it into practice is much more difficult, because you start off by having a lot of things to look at. Sometimes you have to backtrack, because you're not sure what the trigger was. You got to figure out what's happening. So in real life is not as easy as some of the examples that I give you. Real life is sometimes dirty, and I say dirty meaning that it's not just nice and obvious. And sometimes you can do a recording. You can video-- I'm-- my age, I still call it videotape, but you can video-- record something. Now, there are some ethical considerations. We'll talk about that in the ethics class. But that's one way to do it, and that gives you more opportunity to look and to replay things at a later time so you can get a better idea of what actually is happening, because sometimes, especially with all the antecedents, it's not always real clear. But again, there's ethical considerations. You're interested in one child. You can't-- if they're in a classroom, you're going to be videotaping the entire classroom, where you're going to see the child interactions with others. So you know, there's some issues that you may be recording some children who you don't necessarily need to record, but that's something that's for a future discussion. But it does help if you can do that. I told you that-- I gave the example, my wife's dissertation. We were able to see some things, and we saw what the good students supposedly got away with and that the so-called bad students didn't get away with, because of that. Now, it was research. She wasn't there for you know to call out the teacher on everything, but we could see certain things, because we had the opportunity to look at things multiple times. Now, I do use a specific form, and you'll have access to a specific form to use. The one that I developed, because I've done more observations in classrooms, is a more classroom based form. But it could be used in the home. You can develop your own forms. It's not difficult. So it's going to be provided to you as a Word document. You can expand upon it. You can make it larger. You can adjust it to fit your needs. Just remember this is a sample, and you don't have a lot of experience doing this, so you may want to use it. But having some sort of form does help when you're doing this or any type of observation. Generally speaking, what I do is I have an antecedent column, a behavior column, and a consequence column. And then I just try to write things down as they go on when I see them. Sometimes I have to write the behavior first as it occurred, then I can go back and fill in what I remember from the antecedent. But again, things that take time for you to learn how to do. OK. Let's go back to-- getting away from just ABCs and talk about some issues in doing observations and conducting observations. How do we do, say, some sort of time sampling procedure? What do we do? Recognize that you have a target child. This is the client, that [inaudible] the individual who is the focus of your work, who you are working to maybe develop a program, but you you're trying to record their behavior. There are going to be other children in the classroom. It's a lot of time where you're going to be doing a lot of observations in classrooms, and especially if you're dealing with behaviors that will be behavioral issues in the classroom. You're going to have a child that you're interested in, the target child, and you may also have a control child. Now, when I was in graduate school, many, many years ago, how I was taught, just sample the child's behavior. We didn't get a control child. We just recorded the frequency of the target child's behavior and that was it. And then as I went on, I got more training, more experiences, I learned that it's a much better idea to have an idea of how the child is behaving relative to other children in the class. So what I initially did was I had the-- I went to the teacher and I'd ask the teacher, could you just give me the behavior of a same sex child in the classroom. Now when I say same sex, and I'll tell you the reason I do this, like it or not, it's hard to deny, there are differences in the behavior of boys and girls. It's not a sexist thing I'm saying. It's just a fact of life. Boys behavior can differ from girls behavior. Boys tend to be more active. Boys tend to be louder. Boys engage in more disruptive behaviors. Girls, overall, tend to be more compliant. When girls do act out, they tend to do it more covertly than do boys. So it's best to use a same sex child. So what I used to do was I would ask the teacher, give me an idea of somebody, another child, another boy in the classroom who you would say is the average child. And I would go back, and I'd do one observation session-- interval, I should say. One observation interval using the target child, and the next one with this supposed average child. Target child, average child. Target child, average child. So let's just say there were a hundred observations during that, 50 of the observations would be with the target child, 50 observations would be with the control child. Gives me an idea of how that child is functioning relative to what the teacher is saying is the average child in the classroom. Now, this is easier done in a classroom, obviously, than in the home, because the home is less likely to have multiple children. You won't necessarily have the control. So if you do in the home, you're probably just going to be doing the observation of the child. Excuse me. So what you do is, again, interval one, you'd look at the target child. Interval two, you'd look at the control child, which is, again, somebody else in the classroom. Interval three, you look at the target child. Interval four, the control child. And so on and so on throughout the observational period. Now, as I've gone through in my career-- and I already had my PhD when I met my wife. And fortunately, I have a wife who also has her PhD, also in school psychology, and she's also trained as a behavior analyst. She also has her BCBAD. So you'll also get to meet her in the podcast. Actually, this is week three, so you already have met her, at least heard her voice, in the podcast, because she's doing the podcast with me. And I want to give her credit for this, because she's the one who taught me this and she learned this in graduate school. And she went-- she graduated from graduate school 12 years after I got my PhD. So I got mine in '87, she got hers in '99. So things changed a little bit, and her training was a little bit different than my training. But she taught me that, that it's a better idea to not just use one control child, but rather, use all of the same sex children in the classroom as the control child. Now how do you do that? How do you observe-- let's say in a classroom in which there are say 10 other boys in the classroom-- you get your target child and you have 10 other boys. How do you observe 10 other boys? Well, you do it by, again, interval one, target child. Interval two, you take one boy. Just randomly select one boy. Interval three, target child. Interval four, another boy in the classroom. Interval five, target child. Interval six, a third boy in the classroom. And so on and so on. So you're still going to say-- let's say it again that 100 times you're going to have 50 observations of your target child and 50 observations of other people in the classroom, they're just not all going to be the same child. They're going to be-- so you're going to get a better idea of how other boys in the classroom are actually responding. And recognize, if you do this, and say a teacher has complained that you know there's some problem behavior with this one child, and you do your observation and you find that the target child's behavior doesn't differ from the average of the others in the classroom, then it's more of a problem in the classroom as opposed to a problem with that child. Think about it, teacher maybe focusing in on that one child, but the teacher may not have much in the way of controls in the classroom and the behavior that she's complaining about with that one child is actually a behavior that's common to others in the classroom. So that's what I recommend doing is your observations, what my wife recommended, which is target child and then control child varying from the other same sex individuals in the classroom. Pretty interesting. Now when you're doing so, obviously, in the home, you don't have that much opportunities. Although, there are less things generally happening in the home. May be a little bit easier to do an ABC type of observation, because there's going to be less stimuli going on around them to try to find antecedents in consequences to the behavior. So depending on the job that you get, depending on the reason for your observation, you're going to make your selection of the observational system and what you're going to be doing. Let me just get another quick sip here. What I want to do now, and some of this is going to be redundant, but let me quickly just run through some things that we'd already talked about. Start with event recording. Event recording is just simply-- that's what I mentioned you have a teacher recording incidents of aggressive behavior. All you're doing is getting a simple frequency of how often the behavior occurs. It's very simple. You're just recording the number of events over a period of time. You can say something happened three times in an hour, for example. Very simple. Permanent products, I mentioned those. If you can add permanent products to your observational system-- not all behaviors that you're interested in are going to have a permanent product, especially if you're going to end up working with children with autism, children on the spectrum, you're less likely to have a permanent product than if you're working in a regular education classroom and you're focusing on academic types of behaviors. So depending on what it is, but if there is the opportunity to do get some sort of permanent product, add that to your recording system. Duration recording is just how much time something happened. On task, off task type of behavior in a classroom, for example. How often did it happen, just recording the cumulative amount of time during an overall observational period. Say an hour, how much of that hour was spent off task, how much was spent on task. I'm going to go through this relatively quickly, because we talked about these things before. Latency recordings, just the time that elapsed between stimulus and response. Now in this case, we're generally talking about a discriminative stimulus, which is you may see an abbreviation, S superscript d. That means stimulus discriminative, or discriminative stimulus. It's just an abbreviation that's used to define a discriminative stimulus, which we'll talk about in more detail in a future week. But in general, it's just something that reliably predicts a behavior. Somebody puts a donut in front of me, I eat it. The discriminative stimulus is that donut. The behavior is eating that donut. Only a very simple one, which also shows my lack of self-control, but that would be an example of a discriminative stimulus. Somebody says to you, hey, you look nice today, and you say, thank you. The discriminative stimulus is the compliment. Your response is saying thank you. Very simple examples a discriminative stimulus and a response. We are looking at this type of thing sometimes with parents and teachers. Parents and teachers, when they say to the students, do this. Now parents and teachers should not be making requests in most cases of students or children. They should be issuing commands. Because command's telling the individual what to do. A request is-- they can easily say no. You know, would you like to eat your vegetables? No, not really. I don't want to do it. Teacher's says to student, oh, would you like to do your math worksheet? No, I don't feel like it today. You're giving them any opportunity to say they don't like it. You tell them-- OK, the teacher would say, it's time to do your math workshop. Need to be giving commands, because they're the adult, the other persons the child. You're supposed to tell them what to do as the adult. So recognize that. And that's simply-- because that can solve so many problems sometimes with the parents and teachers by just changing the way they word things, and stop wording things in terms of requests and to say them more definitively. I want you to do this. If you go into a classroom, just classrooms, and you see teachers that have good control of their classrooms, a lot-- they don't give students a lot of outs. They're telling the students what to do. There are times when it's appropriate to give a request, especially with parents there are times. Oh, do you want to do this, wanna do that? No, not really. But there are other times where things need to be worded as a command, and again, something that we can talk about later on when we go into interventions. So let's go back a little bit. I know we got a little bit off topic there, but let's go back to interval recording. Partial interval recording is when you record that something occurred during an interval. It could happen for a very small period time during that interval. If you're talking about talking out of turn and it just happens a little blurt-- [blurting] Happened for a second out of a 15 second interval, you're still recording. It happened during that time. So anytime during it occurs, you're recording it as having occurred. Whole interval, on the other hand, it means it has to happen over the entire interval. Remember, we talked about that. Partial interval tends to be better than whole interval. I'll go into a couple of that in just a second. But as I said, my preference is to use 15 second observe intervals, followed by a five second record interval, which gives you three recordings per minute. Usually, I do a recording for a minimum of 15 minutes, overall recording session, for at least 15 minutes, sometimes 20, more likely to be 30. Don't always go up to an hour. I think 30 minutes is usually enough. You don't generally have to go up to an hour, although, there may be times the behavior is not real frequent that you may need to go for a longer session. So we'd-- but we're going to decide on this based on the needs of the child in our data collection procedure. So it's five seconds-- 15 seconds to observe, five seconds to record. Now, what I use I call a beep tape, because back in the old days when I had to do this using a-- making my own tape on a cassette, having to sit there, I can remember sitting in my apartment when I was in graduate school going, observe, watching-- just keeping my eye on my watch going, record, observe, record, and doing that for-- actually, I had to do an hour long one, and I did that for an entire hour. And forgetting, the first time I did it, to turn my phone off. So I had made it through 2/3 of the way through and the phone rang. This is back in the old days when you had landlines and no cell phones. And I had to start over from the very beginning and do the whole thing over again. Well, you don't have to worry about that nowadays. You can program into your cell phone, you can program into your computer ways to create it where you don't have to go through and record yourself. It will do it. In fact, I'll be providing you, in this course, a-- well, I still call it beep tape, but it was done on a computer that has 15 second observe, five second record intervals that will give you a beep to observe and beep beep to record. Beep observe, beep beep record. And it's a lot easier to do than, again, going back to the old times that I had to deal with. OK. Sometimes you may want to go from the-- change from the 15 seconds observe to do maybe a 10 second interval. I rarely, if ever, go less than a 10 second interval, but it's possible there may be a situation where you want to do a five second interval. But most of the time, 15 seconds, consider that the standard. You may want to go down to 10, but rarely would I even go up to-- go higher than 15 to 20. But somewhere in that range. Now, we talk about partial intervals and whole intervals. Partial intervals tend to overestimate the frequency of the behavior. Whole intervals tend to underestimate the frequency of the behavior. So this is kind of like a Goldilocks type of thing. For my opinion-- my opinion is momentary time sampling is just right. So whole intervals are going to underestimate, partial intervals will overestimate, but momentary time sampling can be just right. And when you do any intervention-- sorry, pardon me, we do an observation, there are certain other information you are going to want to make sure that you have recorded. The setting is very important. You want to have a description of the setting where the behavior occurred. If it's in a classroom, if it's in a resource room, if it's in a home environment. What else is going on around them? Make sure that you have written down. You may forget sometimes important things. Make sure, before you do an observation, you have described the environment that in which it's occurring. You want to know what time of day it is. Morning, afternoon, possibly evening, if you're not in a school. One thing you'll discover, as far as time of day, is that sometimes behaviors get worse as the day goes on. Child gets tired, they get more irritable, then behavior problems are more likely to be manifested. So keep those things in mind. So it's important to put those things down. Now, when you are trying to do a systematic observation over time, it's important that you try to do it in the same location. You want to make sure that you are recording behaviors that don't have different types of environmental factors that may be influencing the behavior. You're not going to be able to compare it. So if you're doing baseline recordings over, let's say, five days and then you're doing an intervention, you're recording the behaviors over a certain period of time, you need to make sure that you're doing it in the same place, because there are environmental situations that could affect it. Now there are other environmental situations that could affect it that you may not have control over. Even if you do it in the same setting. Oh, let's take for example Halloween. If you're doing observations on days leading up and then after Halloween, they may differ than on the actual Halloween. Kids may be more antsy, may-- behaviors may change, because they know they get to go trick-or-treating later on. That's just one example. There's a lot of other things that may-- that you may not have control over, but recognize these things that if you can anticipate them ahead of time, you may be able to control for it. But recognize there may be things that-- but one thing you can control for is doing it in the same place. Also, the activity that they're doing. In the classroom, if you're doing an observation one day and they're doing a reading assignment, the next day they're doing arithmetic, and the third day they're doing social studies, can you really compare those? Not necessarily, because somebody may have more problems in reading or more problems in math, and their behaviors may be different when those stimuli are presented to them than in the situation like social studies where they may be more fun or science they like, whatever. They need to be doing similar types of activities. Don't do an observation one day when they're doing seat work by themselves, and the next day when they need to be listening to the teacher or they're watching a film. So try to have as much consistency across time. And obviously, you have to record your name. If these things are going in any type of records, you have to be identified as the person doing the recording. OK. Let's take a slight break here while I get a drink of water. Don't worry, we're getting close to the end. Won't be too much longer. So I want to finish up. I want to talk a little bit about inter-observer or inter-rater reliability. Now, especially if you're doing research-- but it's also good to do it in practice, although, it probably happens less often in practice-- is to have somebody else, at least on part of the time, not every single observation session, but some of the times, doing a recording alongside you. So they are recording the same target behavior, using the same observational system at the same time as you. It's called inter observer or inter-rater reliability. Remember that there are some things, if you've been observing something for a while, you may see things a little bit different than somebody who is observing it for the first time. So we do run into problems with observation. We want to make sure that of the reliability, the accuracy of our observations, so getting somebody else to do an observation at the same time allows us to calculate a measure of reliability between the two. And I said inter-rater or inter observer reliability. It's very simple to calculate. You have them doing the exact same thing that you do. You have certain intervals. Let's just say again, you have 100 intervals. What you're doing is just looking at your rate of agreement over those 100 intervals. So if you and the other person agreed on 90 of the 100 intervals, you have agreed 90% of the time. You have a correlation of 0.9. So your inter-rater reliability is 0.9, which is pretty high. Overall, we want to see at least a inter-rater reliability of 0.8. 0.9 is better, and obviously, if you can get 100% or a correlation of 1 between you and the other person who's doing the observation, that is even the best. Chances are we're going to have some little differences, even if it's something minor that's happening, like you yawned at one point when they didn't and they saw something that you didn't see. But so it's usually we can hope for something in the 90's, accept something as low as 80%. But in order for us to say that we have a reliable observation is that we need to have this inter-rater the inter observer rater reliability at 0.8 or above. As I said, we don't always do this in practice. The most important thing is that we have consistency across our observations. As we'll see, when we talk about how we design studies and how we determine the efficacy of interventions that we may implement, is we start off with the baseline and we get a baseline, we get a recording of the behavior over time, over least a minimum of three times so we can see a pattern if one exists. Usually, I like to do at least five times. Then we implement our observation and we continue to get frequent measures over that period of time. We have to be sure that we are observing the same thing across that entire span of time, across the baseline period, across the intervention period, and finally, if we do a follow up, through a follow up period. We'll talk about this in much greater detail when we talk about the designs that we use in behavior analysis. So it doesn't always happen in practice, and if you maintain the integrity of your observations, that's the most important thing. But it's still not a bad idea to at least sometimes get a check on your observational accuracy by having somebody else do it at the same time with you. But build on all of what we talked about today. We're going to build on this next week. So you'll be able to see the next step of where we're going, and that's hopefully what we're doing throughout this course, throughout the sequence of courses you have. One thing is going to build on another. Is there going to be redundancy? Yes, there will be, but it's important redundancy. It's things that you need to make sure that you know to be a good behavior analyst. I hope you're finding these lectures useful to you. I mean, I've been doing this for a long time. I love this stuff. I love talking about this stuff. I wish you were in presence with me so that I could answer your questions right away. I love doing that too. But overall, I hope you find this useful to you. I hope that you're enjoying them. Hope you don't find me to be too boring. I hope you're looking forward to next week's lecture. I don't get any feedback. I get just the knowledge that I'm trying to impart my knowledge to you, and I hope I'm doing a good job. I thank you very much. I appreciate your attention to this lecture and to all of the lectures that I'm giving, to the podcasts, to everything that you have to deal with in listening to me over and over again every week. I look forward to seeing you again next week, or I should say talking to you, because that's just what I'm doing. I'm not talking with you, because you can't talk back. Although, sometimes I can imagine you may be saying some things back to the screen. But I don't know that. I'll be talking to you next week, and have a good week until then. I look forward to that. And you know, good behavior.