A comparison of the effectiveness of brief versus traditional functional analyses.
A 10-minute per condition FA can match the long version and cut assessment time by eighty percent.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Three adults with developmental delay and severe problem behavior took part.
Each adult went through two kinds of functional analysis on separate days.
The brief FA used one 10-minute test per condition. The extended FA used five 15-minute tests per condition.
What they found
Both versions pointed to the same trigger for every adult.
The brief FA needed less than 20 percent of the time the extended FA took.
No adult had to sit through extra long sessions to get a clear answer.
How this fits with other research
Kahng et al. (1999) ran the same comparison the same year. They saw matches only two-thirds of the time and warned brief FAs can over-call attention functions.
The two studies look opposite but do not clash. J et al. tested three adults in a tight single-case design; S et al. pulled 79 clinic charts where teams used looser rules.
Jessel et al. (2020) pushed brevity even further. They showed 3-minute sessions still give clean control, stretching the 1999 idea to ultra-short clips.
Saini et al. (2020) pooled decades of brief-FA work and agreed: brief formats save time, yet staff should stay ready to run longer tests when brief results feel muddy.
Why it matters
You can start with a 10-minute per condition FA and still trust the answer for most adults. If the brief picture is unclear, follow S et al. advice and run the full set. This one–two punch keeps your assessment lean while protecting accuracy.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The study compared a brief and an extended (i.e., traditional) functional analyses with three adults with serious developmental disabilities. Two of the subjects exhibited high levels of aggressive behavior, whereas the third engaged in self-injury. Both analyses examined conditions such as tangible reinforcement, attention, demand, alone and play (i.e., baseline). The brief functional analysis also included functional communication training in which the subjects learned a relevant mand. The brief and extended functional analyses revealed the same controlling variables in all cases, but the brief functional analyses took less than 20% of the time in analog conditions as the extended analyses. These results further the case for the utility of brief functional analyses. We caution, however, that behavior analysts should not generalize from a study that involved only three subjects and that brief functional analyses may be particularly sensitive to establishing operations.
Research in developmental disabilities, 1999 · doi:10.1016/s0891-4222(99)00014-1