BCBAs who transition from pediatric clinical settings into adult services often encounter a fundamentally different ethical landscape. The stakeholders are more numerous, the power dynamics are more complex, and the behavioral presentations are often more severe, longer-established, and more entangled with systemic responses—including PRN medication protocols, physical restraint procedures, and rights restrictions—that have accumulated over years of service history.
Provider: BehaviorLive — via Behavior Analysis Association of Michigan
Take This Course →Including ethics, supervision, and topics like this one. New live CEU every Wednesday.
Join Free →After over a decade of consulting on cases of severe aberrant behavior in adult populations, we have encountered many ethical challenges that BCBAs may not regularly encounter while working in clinical settings with children. Examples range from being asked to provide guidance on PRN medication administration to restrictions of client rights and intrusive interventions. As a result of pressures from stakeholders, professionals and paraprofessionals may be faced with ethical dilemmas to work outside of their scope of competence. This presentation will discuss many of the ethical scenarios that BCBAs with an autism services background may not consider when working with diverse adult populations, ranging from mundane to extremely dangerous situations. We will conclude with a discussion on the role of social validity in these scenarios and how more input from society as a whole may be required to help determine and shape an ethical approach to behavior analysis in adult services.
| Certification Body | Credits | Type |
|---|---|---|
| BACB® | 1 | Ethics |
| COA | 1 | — |
Dig into the research behind this topic — plain-English summaries written for BCBAs.
279 research articles with practitioner takeaways
258 research articles with practitioner takeaways
252 research articles with practitioner takeaways
You earn CEUs from a dozen different places. Upload any certificate — from here, your employer, conferences, wherever — and always know exactly where you stand. Learning, Ethics, Supervision, all handled.
No credit card required. Cancel anytime.
All behavior-analytic intervention is individualized. The information on this page is for educational purposes and does not constitute clinical advice. Treatment decisions should be informed by the best available published research, individualized assessment, and obtained with the informed consent of the client or their legal guardian. Behavior analysts are responsible for practicing within the boundaries of their competence and adhering to the BACB Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts.