This app is intended for people who are new to behavior analysis, including veterinarians, animal behavior consultants and trainers, zoo keepers, and even parents and teachers. It is designed to help you take the first step in solving problem behaviors, which is to describe what the learner actually does and to place that behavior in a context, not inside the animal. Behavior does not occur in a vacuum or spray out of learners haphazardly. There are always conditions on which behavior depends. Therefore, changing conditions necessarily changes behavior. This is good news because we do have direct control over many of the conditions in which learners behave.
The app guides you through the process of developing hypotheses about the functional relations among antecedents, behaviors and consequences – the behavior ABCs. The following key questions are the heart of this app and can help focus your observations on the ABCs:
* What does the problem look like in terms of actual behavior, i.e., what do you see?
* What does the learner get, or get away from, by emitting this behavior?
* Under what conditions does the learner do this behavior, i.e., what events predict it?
* What do you want the learner to do instead?