Association for Behavior Analysis International

Science is often described in terms of scientific methods. Outside our discipline these often emphasize group designs and statistics, even in fields the practice of which involves working with individuals. But our methods vary vastly depending on the questions we’re trying to answer. I’ll use case histories from the research with which I’m most familiar (i.e., my own) to illustrate the potential range of our scientific experiences: from identifying functional variables to determining whether a phenomenon even exists and, if so, exploring its properties; from parametric studies to experimental analogues of human phenomena; from simply seeing what happens given some procedure to creating simulations; from demonstrations to thought experiments; from exploring parallels across phenomena spanning different disciplines to conducting replications in class or in student labs; and, perhaps most important, defining our units and organizing our taxonomies of behavioral processes. We can hardly expect to produce an exhaustive list, but a healthy science needs a range of variations upon which selection can operate.

I hope for a broad audience of those with interests in the experimental and quantitative and applied analysis of behavior and its history and theories, but practitioners are also welcome.