Weekly Episode Plan- 1/2/22- 1/8/22

Hey there Behaviorists!

I hope everyone had a great New Year's and stayed safe out there! After a slow and relaxing week prior, we are back on the ABA research grind with two ABA in One Take episode and a One Less Lonely Practitioner episode. It should be a fun week, so tune in to listen!

Monday

Self- Monitoring for the New Year!

With all the New Year's resolutions flying around, I thought I would start a little tradition for our podcast. Every new year’s episode, we will be covering some type of ABA research related to healthy eating or increasing activity. This year, we are going to cover one of my favorite topics, self-monitoring or management. The actual components of a self-monitoring program differ, but generally speaking, there is some aspect of feedback, goal setting, and self-data tracking. By combining these elements, you can bring together a self-sustaining system to promote behavior change. This article is a meta-analysis of the different procedures being used in this space and reviews the effectiveness. Different holes in the literature are identified and we (selfishly) discuss how we can use what these researchers have learned to help us stick to our own resolutions.

Citation

Page, E. J., Massey, A. S., Prado-Romero, P. N., & Albadawi, S. (2020).The use of self-monitoring and technology to increase physical activity: A review of the literature. Perspectives on Behavior Science, 43(3), 501–514.  https://doi.org/10.1007/s40614-020-00260-0

Wednesday

Training and getting buy-in from direct care staff

Another One Less Lonely Practitioner episode since you all seem to like it so much! In this episode, we talk to Kaitlyn, a BCBA based in New Jersey in an interesting role. Her role involves minimal actual clinical work and is solely focused on the training of direct care staff as they go to implement procedures in behavior change programs. With her background in severe behavior married to this new OBM style position, she definitely has a lot of actionable advice for the everyday Analyst. We discuss the differences between severe behavior and skill acquisition, the struggles of training staff, and different actionable procedures to follow to ensure staff fidelity and buy-in. At the end, we even sprinkle in a little bit of imposter syndrome and discuss what it was like to go from the clinical work to a training role. I had a great time discussing these topics with Kaitlyn, and I hope you will enjoy and learn a little bit as you listen!

Friday

How the knowledge of metaphysics can improve your practice

In what is I think the strangest topic we have covered so far; we dive into the topic of metaphysics and its application to behavior analysis. One of the advantages of not having a JABA issue to review is that I get to pick and choose what articles I want to cover. I debated a while about this topic, but finally I just decided to go for it! I am no philosopher, but the topics covered in this analysis were fascinating and really changed my perspective on the debate between mentalism and behaviorism. It also helped clarify some assumptions that I always had but did not know where they came from. Why is that important? Every single day we are in the process of selling our worldview (determinism) to a caregiver, child, staff member, someone who most likely has grown up with an anti-deterministic worldview. By better understanding all the different views out there, we can better modify our language to promote a healthy and honest discussion about the topics that are truly giving pause to those we are trying to elicit buy-in from. Working through this article (and podcast) I hope will give you some of the same clarification that it gave me while having those discussions.

Citation

Leslie, J. C. (2021). The relevance of metaphysics to behavior analysis. Perspectives on Behavior Science, 44(1), 29–40. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40614-020-00277-5