Inside Behavior Analysis
Volume 3 | 2011 | Number 2 | Online ISSN: 2151-4704
Association for the Advancement of Radical Behavior
By Alessandro Valdina and Italo Viganò
In 2010–2011, the Association for the Advancement of Radical Behavior Analysis (AARBA) focused on the following areas: behavior-based safety (B-BS) protocol application in production sites, B-BS education, and organizational behavior management.
Behavior-Based Safety: What Happened After the Fourth European Conference
The Fourth European Conference on B-BS, held in Venice on April 14–16, 2010, was a great success. This conference, which was the main European event on behavior safety in 2010, resulted in a number of new implementations of the B-BS protocol in plants in late 2010 and early 2011. Some of these involved AARBA in analyzing process effectiveness.
In fact, sensitivity to the role of behavior in accidents is increasing, and large organizations, like multinational companies, are more and more likely to invest in programs to improve the use of safety behaviors that reduce accidents at work.
For instance, in 2011, under the scientific coordination of AARBA, safety-promotion activities developed by Bayer resulted in a scientific study by two students at Polytechnic of Milan. The students used this study as their thesis in their safety-engineering master course.
A number of activities in the second part of 2010 helped promote the science of behavior safety; in particular, AARBA participated in the Fifth European Association for Behaviour Analysis Conference in Crete, September 22–24; the Ambiente e Lavoro Conference in Modena, October 6–7; and a Conference in Confindustria Bergamo, October 26, with a lecture by Judith Komaki on safety leadership.
With the aim to further spread the concept and protocol of behavior-based safety, AARBA held the Fifth European Conference on Behavior-Based Safety at Milan University on June 15–17, 2011; this year the event included a parallel session on applied behavior analysis with the participation of major European behavior analysts. The conference was co-organized by the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies (USA).
Behavior-Based Safety: Educational Activities
AARBA made a tremendous effort in B-BS education in 2010–2011 through a postgraduate course in behavior-based safety that will have been through its 12th–16th editions from October 2010 to October 2011. A total of 100 attendees from companies (e.g., HSE managers) or safety institutions (e.g., national work insurance companies) had the chance to get the qualification of experts in B-BS with the master courses held in Milan (October–December 2010, AARBA), La Spezia (March–April 2011, Confindustria Regional Industrial Association), Genoa (June 2011, RINA Nautic Italian Register), and Rome (May–June 2011, AIAS Safety Professionals Association). Master's courses are scheduled again in Milan (October–December 2011, AARBA).
An extremely important new step in the advancement of B-BS knowledge is the institution of the second-level master's in B-BS at Polytechnic of Milan. This is the first university postgraduate course in Italy (500 hours of lectures and 1,200 hours on production sites). This master's degree bestows on participants the qualifications of a B-BS specialist. The AARBA president is the vice director of the program.
Organizational Behavior Management
AARBA is still fully involved in the ManuVAR project, one of the biggest projects of the Seventh Framework Program financed by the European Commission. The aim of this project is to develop virtual reality technologies to help European industries. AARBA leads a cluster of Italian participants thanks to its knowledge of managing human factors in an organizational context. The closing of the ManuVAR project is forecast for 2012. At present, AARBA researchers and coders are developing a training machine that combines precision teaching, instructional design methods, and virtual and augmented reality.
A particularly important area of organizational behavior management (OBM) activity by AARBA is dentistry, where a continuous education program for dentists is in place; topics regularly covered are management and motivation of assistant personnel, doctor/patient communication, and techniques for presenting and managing treatment plans. Hundreds of dentists are trained yearly in OBM. The AARBA president is a regular speaker at the Italian Society of Dentistry conferences on behavior management topics.
Last but not least, AARBA continues to disseminate information on behavior analysis via the Journal of Applied Radical Behavior Analysis (JARBA), which is a free web publication. It contains articles by prominent Italian researchers covering topics such as disabilities, autism, precision teaching, and more.