Association for Behavior Analysis International

While the field of applied behavioral science has provided many solutions for individual-level behavior change, much work is left to be done to ensure that these interventions and strategic approaches reach their potential to improve population-level health impacts. This presentation will focus on the advantages of integrating three seemingly disparate fields—behavioral science, community psychology and public health. By integrating key aspects of these fields of study, we can take advantage of the key strengths of each field and fulfill the promise of applied behavior analysis in creating a context which is more successful than before. Theoretical underpinnings of this approach will be presented, and examples of successful adaptation and intervention will be provided.

Dr. Vincent Francisco is Kansas Health Foundation Professor of Community Leadership in the KU Department of Applied Behavioral Science, and Director of the Center for Community Health and Development, a World Health Organization Collaborating Centre at the University of Kansas. In his work, he uses behavioral science methods to help understand and improve conditions that affect population health and health equity. He publishes widely in the areas of health promotion, capacity building, and community-based research and intervention. Dr. Francisco is a co-developer of the Community Tool Box, a widely-used Internet-based resource for promoting community health and development.
He brings expertise and experience to implementing community–based research, especially for prevention of HIV and chronic disease. He has years of experience mentoring undergraduate and graduate researchers and practitioners with community-based organizations throughout the United States and abroad. He has experience designing and implementing community-based and participatory HIV and sexual risk reduction interventions since he was a member of the Adolescent Medicine Leadership Group, Chair of the Community Prevention Leadership Group, and a member of the Executive Committee of the NIH Adolescent Trials Network for HIV/AIDS Interventions from 2003 through 2011. He has 11 years of experience in partnering with community-based organizations in North Carolina for applied health promotion research that includes access to care, risk reduction for HIV and sexual risk reduction, as well as capacity building for empowerment of marginalized groups.
In addition, he has considerable experience working in residential and day treatment programs (e.g., Spaulding Youth Center, Rhode Island Hospital), working on primary prevention of youth violence, drug and alcohol use among teens, teen pregnancy prevention, diabetes and cardiovascular disease prevention. He has been a consultant with numerous federal and state agencies on community-based and community-engaged approaches to prevention and treatment of behavioral disorders, and is recognized internationally as a resource among foundations and governmental agencies.

Each year, an estimated 4.2 million unaccompanied youth ages 13-25 experience homelessness in the United States. The threats facing young people in housing crisis are many and their potential impacts, harrowing. Youth are at high risk for physical and sexual victimization, mental and physical illness, involvement with the criminal justice system, and face serious threats to their education, their future economic stability, and their lives. This presentation will critically examine the current approach to services for youth in situations of homelessness in the United States. Directly informed by the lived experience of young people, it calls for a shift in our understanding of the nature and scope of the problem and consequently, our practice and policy strategies being implemented to address it.

This presentation provides a review of the application of elementary principles of operant behavior (both contingency-shaped and rule-governed behavior), toward the conceptualization, design, and evaluation of social welfare policy. All social policy is intended to influence human behavior, and it does this most often through the contrived manipulation of contingencies of punishment and, sometimes, reinforcement. Policies that use contingency management are provided to support this thesis, examples illustrating the use of positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, positive punishment, negative punishment, shaping, and extinction. A form of within subject research designs known as time series studies are ideally suited to evaluate the outcomes of social welfare policies. Too often social welfare policies are devised on the basis of common sense, and lack a strong empirical background of successful experimental pilot testing under real life conditions. Thus, it is common for such policies to be ineffective, or to produce short or long term results that are harmful. Behavior analysts can contribute to the improvement of local communities and our larger society by contributing their expertise in altering human behavior via the design of new welfare policies, the modification of existing programs, and the critical analysis of ineffective ones.

Bruce Thyer, Ph.D. is a Distinguished Research Professor with the College of Social Work at Florida State University. A BCBA-D, he is also a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in Florida and Georgia. He has devoted much of his career to promoting the adoption of behavior analysis within the field of social work. He has been a reviewer for the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis and a former Associate Editor with that journal. He has published widely in the ABA literature and also in the fields of social work, psychology and psychiatry.

This symposium will examine the issue of global poverty and analyze policies aimed to reduce poverty from a behavioral perspective. Presenters will offer a conceptual framework for chronic poverty and considerations in collecting and interpreting data related to public policy issues including child welfare practice. Potential actions and technological advancements will be discussed for providing adequate social services and breaking the cycle of chronic poverty to achieve a better world.

Behavior analysts have long recognized the benefits of closely following their data; however, the data we are following may be changing faster than the tools we employ to analyze it. Recently, a variety of parametric and non-parametric statistical techniques have become popular alternatives to our foundational tactics in scientific research--even when the data at hand defies the underlying critical statistical assumptions. This problem even saturates behavior analytic investigations that focus on the evaluation of complex data related to public policy issues in areas such as poverty, geriatrics, and child welfare practice. Indeed, it is not uncommon to find statistical artifacts and anomalies tainting articles within many of our most prestigious journals within the disciplines of social services, criminal justice, and urban development. To further complicate this issue, many of our current technological advances are generating nonlinear, non-independent, and non-normal outcomes. In the face of this research enigma, there exists a much more powerful and precise set of classification and prediction platforms for researchers in the behavioral sciences. Unlike conventional statistical strategies, these systems do not entail critical assumptions pertaining to linearity, homoscedasticity, statistical independence, or normality. In this paper, we explore the many ways in which several artificial intelligence systems and related neural network models are capable of accurately classifying and predicting outcomes employing data that is inconsistent with the assumptions underlying conventional statistics. We argue that these models have potential application to a broad spectrum of behavior analytic goals.

Dr. Jomella Watson-Thompson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Applied Behavioral Science, and the Director of the Center for Service Learning at the University of Kansas. She is also an Associate Director with the Center for Community Health and Development. She attained a Ph.D. in Behavioral Psychology and a Masters of Urban Planning from the University of Kansas. She applies behavioral science methods and interventions to improve how communities address issues related to community health and development. Her research has focused on behavioral-community approaches to neighborhood development, substance abuse prevention, and youth and community violence prevention. Dr. Thompson supports community-engaged scholarship using participatory approaches to address social determinants or factors that may contribute to disparities, particularly for marginalized groups and communities. She has researched the effects of community-based processes and behavioral-community interventions to promote mobilization and change in communities.  Dr. Thompson has co-authored articles on community capacity-building, youth development, and prevention and received numerous federal, state and local funding awards.  She is as an Associate Editor with Behavior and Social Issues.  Dr. Thompson has extensive experience providing training, technical support and evaluation for coalitions and community-based initiatives.

Although the world has made huge efforts to overcome global poverty, 10% of the world's population still lives in extreme poverty without access to the most basic needs such as water, sanitation, health, and education. Some families experience this condition for many years facing a situation that is difficult to emerge from. Previous studies have shown that the constraints of poverty induce a focus on immediate and safe payoffs. This situation becomes a cycle that perpetuates from generation to generation. This presentation will explore ways policy can be designed to incentivize individuals in the lower socioeconomic class to change their decision-making behaviors. Based on a behavioral perspective, we will: 1) present a conceptual framework for chronic poverty, 2) discuss government policies aimed at reducing poverty, and 3) illustrate how intersectoral actions can provide adequate social services to alter the options faced by impoverished families and help address poverty and social exclusion.

Much of the applied behavior analytic literature centers on changing individual behavior in a controlled environment, yet behavior analysis research and practice has critical applications in community and population-level behavior. Its application to the field of public health, for instance, provides scientists with a technology for functional contextual analyses of behaviors related to health conditions such as HIV acquisition and substance use disorder. This talk focuses on how applied behavior analysis can further expand to address critical public health issues within marginalized and underserved communities. Special attention will be given to cultural considerations in developing, implementing, and evaluating behavior-analytic interventions in these populations.

Dr. Kaston D. Anderson-Carpenter is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Michigan State University. He also holds appointments as Core Faculty in the MSU Consortium for Multicultural Psychology Research and Affiliate Faculty in the MSU Institute for Public Policy and Social Research. He earned his Ph.D. in Behavioral Psychology from The University of Kansas and a Master of Public Health degree with honors from The University of Kansas School of Medicine. He also earned a Master of Arts degree in Experimental Psychology and Applied Behavior Analysis from McNeese State University. Additionally, is a Board Certified Behavior Analyst-Doctoral (BCBA-D) and Licensed Behavior Analyst in the state of Michigan.
Dr. Anderson-Carpenter’s research focuses on substance use and determinants of health in underserved and marginalized communities. Since 2010, Dr. Anderson-Carpenter has worked with local community organizations, state coalitions, and policy makers to address socially important issues affecting marginalized and underserved populations. He has worked in many areas, including substance use and HIV/STI prevention, LGBTQ+ health, and Arab American health. Dr. Anderson-Carpenter’s work has been published in a number of journals and is the 2015 recipient of the G. Alan Marlatt Award for distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions by the Society of Addiction Psychology.

Several behavioral programs are advancing the culture of behavioral science. These presenters will offer recent research across universities in the U.S. and Brazil relevant to large scale behavior change and social activism. Topics discussed will focus on how culturo-behavior scientist can use research to inform and impact public policy.

Universities should highlight the consequences of antagonistic approaches to societal challenges. These are often paralleled into ideological frontiers. Even though there are need for highly specialized competencies to solve some of the wicked problems society encounter, the ability to exploit and explore complementary solutions increases as complexity grows. On all levels, from agent interaction to policy makers, the multidisciplinary behavioral insight offers tools that more effectively and more efficiently meet intended goals and address the real needs of citizens and end-users. Government interventions are often based on deductive approach, assuming human behavior to be profoundly rational and implementing reforms at full scale. By using the growing body of behavioral insights, one might debias this process by moving away from sometimes unrealistic assumptions of rationality to discover the actual behavior of individuals through problem identification, behavior analysis, experimentation and trialing that tests multiple policy responses at a smaller scale to determine the best course of action in a cost-effective manner. This will enable our students to not only addressing societal challenges, but also ability to contributing to the solutions.

Behavior analysis is well known in Brazil as one of the main approaches to experimental psychology, and a clinical practice to intervene with neurotypical or delayed developmental audiences. Less known in the country is how behavior analysis may approach social issues and systemic interventions. Although this has been an area of intense growth in Brazil in the last two decades, most of the students in psychology don't know that behavior analysis deals with such topics. This presentation discusses some of the contingencies and metacontingencies that selected approaching social issues in Brazil, especially how Psychology Faculties and students over the years in general (Behavior Analysis in it) have been part of social movements and directly related to social sciences since the 1970s. The presentation finish with some of the strategies used to propagate this area among students in Brazil.

As a recently formalized specialization, Culturo-Behavior Science (CBS) explores how to take behavior science to scale; how to better understand the influences of social, institutional, and cultural variables on cooperative and competitive behavior; and how behavior science can contribute to solving some of the world’s most pressing problems. However, determining where to start and what strategies to use to develop expertise in an emerging specialization may prove challenging. Opportunities to be mentored, join labs, take formal courses, and conduct research in CBS are not yet widely available. Nonetheless, the Department of Behavior Analysis at the University of North Texas has been instrumental in providing such opportunities for students, faculty, and scholars (i.e., the Behavior and Culture Lab coordinated by Glenn from 2006-2012). Recently, we have rekindled such efforts with the creation of the Cultural Design and Systems Lab (Cihon, Becker, & Ortu 2018 to present) and the provision of graduate-level coursework in CBS. The goal of this presentation is to describe our recent efforts to provide opportunities for students, faculty, and scholars to pursue their interests in CBS and to make tangible suggestions for students, faculty, and scholars interested in getting started in CBS.

Dr. Traci Cihon received her master’s degree from the University of Nevada-Reno and her PhD from The Ohio State University. Currently, she is an Associate Professor in the Department of Behavior Analysis at The University of North Texas where she teaches graduate level courses in ethics and behavioral systems analysis and the undergraduate Organizational Behavior Management courses. Dr. Cihon has developed behavioral interventions for individuals with and without disabilities in home and school settings both domestically and internationally. Her scholarship focuses cultural and-behavioral systems science, verbal behavior, international and interdisciplinary work, and behavioral education. At UNT, Dr. Cihon co-leads the Cultural Design & Systems Lab, conducting research that contributes to our understanding of how cultural phenomena develop from a systems and selectionist perspective. In addition, she serves on editorial boards for several peer-reviewed journals including The Analysis of Verbal Behavior, Behavior and Social Issues, Perspectives on Behavior Science, and the American Annals of the Deaf. Her most recent projects include co-editing a special section of Perspectives on Behavior Science focused on cultural and behavioral systems science and co-editing Behavior Science Perspectives on Culture and Community, part of a new ABAI book series - both with Dr. Mark Mattaini, and serving as the editor for a special section in Behavior and Social Issues on papers developed from the 5th Think Tank on Cultural Analysis.

For many social activists and applied researchers, once a technology that can solve a social problem is found, basic science loses its importance. For them, dealing with “big issues” is more important than investing in abstract understanding or predicting natural phenomena. In fact, ideas such as social justice, human rights, and environmental changes require urgent solutions. For this reason, knowledge directly related to behavior changes on a large scale is usually viewed as more important for social change than the ones made by basic science. The first is assumed to deal with “real-world problems” while the second is viewed as something abstract and distant from social demands in a world that claims for social change. However, the knowledge that comes from basic science is probably the most fundamental source of power in modern societies and more than an initial step to technology and innovation. Technology and innovation is only one aspect of scientific development. This presentation stands that basic science in culturo-behavior science is also a “real-world problem” in the sense that it explores fundamental questions of human existence, constantly reviews our comprehensions on our basic phenomena, provides a deep understanding of why certain practices works or not and connects us with other sciences. This is what makes scientific literacy a key component for social activism: we cannot only be efficient to promote behavior and social change in large scale, we must also inform people about what behavior means, what is cultural practices, so people can independently make better decisions in their daily lives. I will try to highlight the need for a mutual relationship among basic science, applied science, programs for behavior change in large scale, and scientific literation as a mission for culture-behavior science.

The principles of behavior analysis hold great promise for addressing many of the major challenges faced in society. Yet the applications of behavior analysis remain limited in scope and breadth. This session will focus on the large-scale application of applied behavior analysis in educational settings. Emphasis will be given to identifying the core features of effective educational environments, and the process for implementing those features with high fidelity, sustainability, and at scales of social significance. Experience over the past two decades with implementation of positive behavioral interventions and supports (PBIS) in over 27,000 schools will be described.