Tips for Collecting & Analyzing ABC Data

Let's talk about the best way to figure out why problem behavior is happening. We're going to be using a checklist-style data sheet and Google Forms. I'm Sasha Long. I'm a former special education teacher and board-certified behavior analyst, and I am passionate about bridging the gap between evidence-based practices and real-world strategies that work in your classroom. Today we're going to talk ABC data. Now, when someone hands me a notebook filled with anecdotal ABC data, I'm not interested. And it's not because I don't value their hard work, because I know that took a ton of time to do. I'm not interested because those notes are not helpful for determining patterns, for figuring out what's consistently happening before or after behavior, and that information is critical to figure out why problem behavior is happening. Before we can implement any intervention, before we can add any strategy, we have to have a good idea about why that problem behavior is occurring so we know what missing skills to teach. Decreasing problem behavior is actually all about increasing positive ones, and doing an FBA, a functional behavior assessment, and using ABC data, antecedent behavior consequence data, is gonna help us get there. A lot of acronyms, I'm gonna walk you through it. So the first step, as I said, of figuring out what intervention to use is figuring out the why. Taking about a bunch of notes of what happens before and after the behavior is going to be really time-consuming and also not helpful. Because my goal with this data is to get to my best guess on why the problem behavior is happening. Is this behavior work refusal or work avoidance? Is it a sensory response? Is it attention-seeking? What happens around the behavior helps inform my decision. So I much prefer a checklist style ABC data sheet. This is so much easier to use in situ. I'm going to show you in a minute. And the best part is it's a lot faster to determine the patterns— what's happening before, what's happening after— and that's going to help us out. Now what I would recommend is taking ABC data on this data sheet and then putting this data into Google Forms. The combination of the checklist style data sheet, which is easy to use during the day in a crisis situation, and then having the analysis be on Google Forms is so powerful. Google Forms is gonna help us pick up different things and trends that we might not have noticed. We can't take data on a computer while we're in a crisis situation, so we need paper and pencil first, and then onto the Google Forms. So let's see how we use this data sheet. Okay, I've put in some mock data so we can see what this looks like, and I'll add some as well. So we have the date, the time, the staff member. Then here we have a section of antecedents. This is what happens before the behavior. This is everything that could have happened ahead of time. I always have data sheets that are editable, so I edited these to be the things that are functional for this child. The behavior we're looking at is— here is hitting. We're looking at a frequency count. And then we have the consequences. What are the possible things that could happen after? So every time there's a behavior, I just add in my frequency count. Maybe I'm using a click counter here, and then I just check the relevant antecedent and consequence. What happened before? What happened after? Very quick and easy to do. The best part is now we notice trends very easily. The first trend I'm noticing— everything's in the morning. That's interesting. We're seeing work demands and transitions as common antecedents, redirection and break as common consequences. Right away, my brain is jumping to an escape behavior because it seems like there's some aversives with transitions and works, and typically there's some redirection or breaks that we're getting out of work. Because this behavior is continuing, we're seeing dysfunction. So every time there's a new behavior, I'm just going to add it in— what time it is, who took the data. I'm going to add in what all the relevant antecedents are. I'm going to add in how many times the behavior happened. And then any consequence. All right, now that the data sheet is filled out, now we are on to our computer to input that into Google Forms. Want someone to submit data, you can send them the link. I like to use this shortened version. You can bookmark it on your computer, you can email it to all of your staff, your clinicians, and have everyone have this form. So here we are going to look at this form that's already done, and I'm going to submit some data, and we'll look at some responses I already have. So to submit data, I'm going to select who's submitting the data. I'm going to select the date. Let's say this was last Friday. I'm going to pick the time, so let's say it was 11:30, and then I'm going to put the relevant antecedents. Let's say there was a demand requested, a demand presented, a difficult task presented. This behavior lasted 3 minutes and 30 seconds. Now, a note with the duration here: I recommend using a setup like this, like just with a decimal point. If you do it like this, it will not track as a number in the spreadsheet and you won't be able to chart it. So I remember— I recommend doing it like this. I'm just going to go off of what my stopwatch says. I'm not going to convert this into anything. I'm just going to know that the after the decimal point is how many seconds. Then consequence, let's say there was redirection, and I'm gonna click submit. So that's all I have to do. It's that fast, super easy. You could submit a bunch of responses at once. Now let's look at our responses in two different ways. So if you click on the main part of the form, here are the responses. This is where the power really comes from using Google Forms to analyze data. So here we have everyone that has collected data. We have what dates data was collected on, and then this is really cool, which I really— this is why I really recommend tracking the time. This is showing what time the behaviors are happening at. So we're seeing 8:30, 9 o'clock, we're seeing 11, 11:05, 11:15, 11:30. There's twice it happened at 2:15. I mean, before we even get to the antecedents and consequences, guys, I already have so much information here. I see that 11 o'clock is a challenging time of day and 2 o'clock is a challenging time of day. Oh my gosh, I'm gonna go to my schedule, I'm gonna look at what that student's doing at that time. Is there a difficult transition? Is there an unpreferred activity? Is there something that we need to tweak in the environment? Obviously there is, because that's when we're seeing increases in behavior. Now all of the antecedents and consequences are summarized. For this student, we're seeing 60% of the time there's a transition. Ooh, I bet there's a transition in one of these two time periods that's a troublesome one. I want to go figure out why. This is really pointing me in the right direction of what to do. So here, behavior, we have it kind of broken down over how often this is happening. This isn't too helpful. I'll show you in a minute how on the spreadsheet it is helpful. And then we again have the consequences summarized. So there's frequently redirection or requests repeated. So this is going to give me a lot of information that transitions and items being taken away could be a function of this behavior. Maybe escape from transitions is a function of this behavior. Because we're kind of seeing— we're not seeing necessarily, um, breaks given too often, but we are seeing a lot of redirection and that troublesome transition time. So now I'm going to turn this into a spreadsheet. So if you click this button here, it says View Responses in Sheets. So that's going to take me to my spreadsheet. You only have to do this one time and it will automatically open up. I've already made this one, that's why I didn't have to do it again, and I already made this chart, so it stays there all the time. If you are a teacher and you have a lot of paraprofessionals taking data for you, you can just come here and look at this spreadsheet. You don't even have to bother with looking at the Google Form. So here we're gonna— and I'm gonna show a few little things on how we can make this look a little nicer. In general, I like to always click on Wrap so I can see everything a little bit more clearly, and maybe stretch some of these out so I can kind of go across and look at everything pretty quick. So I can see exactly what's going on. So here I can see kind of the antecedents and the consequences again, but what I really wanna see is this information. This is the number of minutes and seconds that the student fell to the floor. So if you select these numbers and you click Insert Chart, which I already did, and then you, I'll just do it again so you can see, and it automatically comes up as a line chart. So here we go, we can see trends, we can add in the dates on the x-axis, this is going to be so helpful to see exactly what's going on, um, see progress over time, see that, okay, we had these bad days, what happened on these bad days. And there you have it, that is the process from ABC style checklist data sheet to Google Forms to analysis, and you're on your tra— the right track to a function-based intervention, which is going to have such an increased likelihood of being effective. To learn more behavior strategies, click follow on the Autism Helper because we've got a lot more where this came from.