Sasha from theautismhelper.com teaches how to identify what reinforces challenging behaviors during functional assessments. She introduces the "million-dollar question": what would you do with a million dollars to prevent this behavior, and what would you do to cause it? The answers reveal hidden reinforcers and triggers that guide replacement skill design.
Hi, this is Sasha from theautismhelper.com, and in this episode I want to talk about identifying behavioral functions and the million-dollar question. So I got this idea from Dr. Greg Hanley and getting to see one of his professional developments, and he talked about this million-dollar question, and I've been using in a lot of scenarios because with some of our kids finding the correct function of their behavior can be really tricky. So when you are doing an FBA and you're taking some ABC data, or maybe you're getting a little bit more involved, you're doing a functional analysis, it might be tricky when you are reviewing your results to figure out what is the function of this behavior. For a lot of our kids, they may have behaviors that are multiply controlled. So that means that it's not just an attention behavior, it's not just an escape behavior, It might be a little bit of both. So there might be some different things going on there, and that can be tricky to identify. It can also be tricky to identify the nuances and behavior of the types of reinforcers that some of the behaviors want, that maybe it's a specific kind of attention or it's a specific kind of escape. And we want to get detailed because we want to ensure that we're teaching a replacement behavior that gets to that exact same reinforcement that the problem behavior wanted. If the problem behavior was to access a certain type of attention, like talking about a specific topic, we want to ensure that our replacement behavior isn't just resulting in generic attention like "good job." We want it to result in that talking about the same topic type of attention. So sometimes when we're going through our data, it's hard to identify that. You might want to also add in from some informal assessments. There's a lot of cool rating scales online that can help you identify function and some great interviews that you can do with parents or caregivers or teachers. To see the function. But one last little layer that I like to add on to all of that goodness— so you still need all of that there, you need your FBA or your FA, and then you need maybe some informal assessments on top of it— but the last little layer that I think can really highlight the reinforcers of that problem behavior is the million-dollar question. So if I gave you a million dollars to prevent this behavior, What would you do? And I know you're gonna say, "Oh, I couldn't do it. I couldn't prevent the behavior." But really think about it right now. A million dollars is on the line. That's a lot of money, and this is tax-free. No one needs to know. It's under the table. How— what would you do? There are some things we would all do if we wanted to prevent the behavior. So maybe if Johnny had— was playing on the iPad, he was sitting by his favorite friend, there were no demands placed on him, and he was in a room that didn't have a fluorescent light on. In that situation, it would be the most unlikely situation I could envision that Johnny— for Johnny to have a meltdown. If he had all of those things, it'd be pretty unlikely for him to have a meltdown then. That gives us so much information. Think of that specific example I just gave, that having the iPad, a preferred friend, removal of demands, and removal of an aversive sensory stimulation like a fluorescent light. Wow, that's giving a lot of information. Maybe I don't need to know all of that, but it might highlight something that our data didn't. Maybe our data didn't really highlight that preferred friend because that wasn't happening in some of those ABC scenarios that we laid out. But when you think about it in that way of the million-dollar question, you're like, "Ooh, but I know he loves Allison, so if Allison was there, he'd be less likely to engage in problem behavior." So then we want to make sure that with our replacement behavior, when Johnny says, "Hey, I want fun time right now," maybe that's the replacement behavior we're teaching, he gets access to the item iPad and his friend Allison because that's an important component of the reinforcer. So if that question helps you kind of get some thoughts going, you can also think about it in the reverse. If I was given a million dollars to cause this behavior, right, no one would do that, this is just for fun here. If I was given a million dollars to cause this behavior to happen, what would I do? This is also going to give you some information. Well, I'd give an unexpected change, I'd say no to a request, and I'd give him this super hard work task. So that's giving a lot of information that transitions and unexpected changes are an issue, that specific types of work tasks are aversive. So then we can look at maybe there's a skill deficit there, maybe there's some skill teaching that I need to do. So it's gonna give you a lot of helpful information when developing your behavior plan that you might not have gotten from some of the other ways of collecting data in your FBA. So I hope you enjoyed this episode of the mini video training series. For more episodes, head over to our YouTube channel or theautismhelper.com.
