Discussion Post and Responses

The scenario I chose discusses Lydia, a young woman with a Traumatic Brain Injury. Lydia is currently learning new vocational skills using a Video Modeling strategy within her workforce program. The current skillset that Lydia is working on is her cleaning skills in order to obtain a job with an office cleaning crew for a local bank chain. The current focus is on vacuuming floors in her training location with the intent to progress to two additional bank locations.

The use of Multiple Baseline Design would be the most appropriate SCRD to use for this case. Fundamentally speaking, Multiple Baseline Design is an experimental approach in which baseline is established and then intervention is applied to one behavior while the others remain unaltered. This process is repeated until all the behaviors are subsequently subjected to intervention. Multiple Baseline Design can be applied to behaviors of the same subject or different subjects as well as different settings.

Applying Multiple Baseline Design to each setting independently that Lydia is engaging in her vacuuming behavior will provide valuable information on the effectiveness of intervention across each setting specifically. Baseline data would be collected on the accuracy of vacuuming in each setting with subsequent exposure to the Video Modeling strategy prior to each instance of vacuuming.

As seen by the hypothetical data all three of the locations reflect similar baseline data averaging around 30% accuracy of vacuuming. Once intervention was introduced within the training location there was ultimately an increasing trend with accuracy reaching 60% accuracy and stability. As long as the data continues in an upward trend and reaches stability, the next step would be to introduce intervention into Bank A and Bank B respectively.

Classmate 2:

HI Class!

Wishing you all the luck for the exam and the Remainder of this term!

            The scenario that I choose discussed Chen, an 8-year-old with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.  As defined by the American Psychiatric Association, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder also known as ADHD is a chronic condition including attention difficulty, hyperactivity, and impulsiveness. It often begins in childhood and can persist into adulthood. It is very common with more than 3 million cases per year.

Chen has a history of difficulty staying in his seat and completing his work. These are his two major areas of concern.  His behavior analyst suggested utilizing a token economy to reinforce Chen’s in-seat behavior.  Chen’s behavior analyst compared the use of Spiderman tokens, which is Chen’s favorite character with a more generic token such as a poker chip or happy face. 

Based on the information provided, the research design that would determine the most effective token use for Chen’s token economy would be an Alternating Treatment Design.  Alternating Treatments Design as defined by the APA dictionary of Psychology is a type of study in which the experimental condition or treatment assigned to the participant changes from session to session or within sessions. In the case of Chen this would be us changing from the use of spider man tokens, to poker chips/happy face tokens.

Alternating treatment designs are helpful because they efficiently compare intervention effectiveness: in the case of Chen, it will show us how effective each token will be. Alternating treatment design can also be used to assess generalization effects.  The downsides to this type of design are that there is a rapid switch in interventions which can be ineffective to reality due to that not being the way interventions are typically applied in the field.

References:

American Psychological Association. (n.d.). Apa Dictionary of Psychology. American Psychological Association. Retrieved January 16, 2022, from https://dictionary.apa.org/

Cooper, J.O., Heron, T.E., Heward, W.L. (2019). Applied Behavior Analysis, 3^rd Edition.