A Clinical Demonstration of Correlational and Experimental Analyses of Precursor Behavior

The team worked with children who had intellectual or developmental disabilities.

They first watched each child and wrote down every time a mild behavior happened right before a big problem behavior.

Next they ran a short test to see if the mild behavior and the big behavior both stopped when the same reward was removed.

The mild behaviors truly belonged to the same response class as the severe ones.

This two-step check let the staff safely test the function without waiting for dangerous behavior.

Borlase et al. (2017) did the same two-step process three years earlier and got the same good result.

Rettig et al. (2019) took the idea one step further: after they found the mild behaviors that came before pica, they blocked those mild behaviors and pica dropped too.

Fahmie et al. (2020) seems to disagree because they ran functional analyses on neurotypical preschoolers, not kids with disabilities. The studies do not clash; they just show the method works in both groups.

You can now run a safer functional analysis. Start by recording what happens right before the big blow-up. If the same reward keeps those mild behaviors alive, you have likely found the function. Treat or prevent the mild behavior and the dangerous one loses its power. No one has to get hurt during assessment.