Compassionate care has emerged as one of the most significant professional movements within behavior analysis over the past decade. The integration of compassionate care into the delivery of behavior analytic services represents not merely a philosophical shift but a substantive change in how practitioners conceptualize their relationships with clients, caregivers, and stakeholders.
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Join Free →In recent years, there has been a great deal of discussion about the importance of compassionate care in the delivery of behavior analytic services. Indeed, there is consensus about the need to incorporate more training in interpersonal skills to ensure that our clients and stakeholders feel maximally respected and supported. Furthermore, additional calls to action have been congruent with this goal; compassionate care has overlap with other values-based movements including assent-based learning, trauma- informed care, and culturally responsive intervention. Progress has been made in identifying the definitional elements of compassionate care and in outlining potential component skills. In addition, qualitative research has broadened our understanding of the skill set; tools to measure the demonstration of component skills have been developed; and pilot studies have used evidence-based interventions to teach this behavioral repertoire. Extensions to direct care service contexts to ensure the extension of the skill set to the ultimate context of importance will be discussed, as well as explorations of this skill set in the context of RBT supervision. Additionally, clinically relevant aspects of compassionate care will be reviewed, including social validity, generality, and authenticity as well as priorities for future research.
| Certification Body | Credits | Type |
|---|---|---|
| BACB® | 1 | Ethics |
| COA | 1 | — |
Mary Jane Weiss, Ph.D., BCBA-D, LABA is the Dean of Institute for Applied Behavioral Science and Director of the Ph.D. Program in ABA at Endicott College, where she has been for 14 years. She also does research with the team at Melmark. She received her Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1990. She previously worked for 16 years at the Douglass Developmental Disabilities Center at Rutgers University. Her interests center on defining best practice and humane ABA techniques, integrating compassionate care and cultural responsiveness into service delivery, enhancing the ethical conduct of practitioners, training staff to be effective at collaboration, and identifying effective instructinal methods in higher education. She is a Fellow of the Association for Behavior Analysis International and serves on the Scientific Council of the Organization for Autism Research, on the board of Association for Science in Autism Treatment, on the editorial board of Behavior Analysis in Practice, on the ABA Ethics Hotline, and as an advisor to the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies.
Dig into the research behind this topic — plain-English summaries written for BCBAs.
280 research articles with practitioner takeaways
279 research articles with practitioner takeaways
258 research articles with practitioner takeaways
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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.