Do you know your ABC's?

Last week’s post focused on the four functions of behavior. If you haven’t read that post it would be helpful to get caught up here. As a quick refresher, all behaviors fall under one of the four functions of behavior; escape, access to attention, access to tangibles, or sensory stimulation. This post will go in to how to recognize patterns in behavior to help understand how consequences shape our behavior.  

As a child we learn our ABC’s to give us a foundation for later skills, reading, and writing. Similarly when looking at a new behavior we are trying to learn more about, behavior analysts conduct an ABC analysis of the behavior. 

A: Antecedent - the event that occurs immediately before the behavior 

B: Behavior - the thing we’re looking at, what the person does

C: Consequence - the event that occurs immediately following the behavior. 

All behavior analysts love charts and graphs and data, it’s how we operate and there’s nothing better than a pretty graph. No? Just me? Ok then. Well, here is what my ABC data sheets look like as I’m trying to figure out a behavior: 

In this super fake but definitely something I’ve seen before scenario, it becomes pretty clear what the driving force behind this behavior is. We could begin to hypothesize that the function of the behavior is access to items or activities. This may seem like a useless exercise but if your child is ever engaging in a problem behavior and you’re trying to figure out what you should do about it, this is an excellent place to start. I will often ask parents to take this data for me over a 2 week period to help me to better understand a behavior. Once things are written down in an organized fashion patterns can become clear and your path to intervention seems to write itself. 

It is also important to look at the consequence to see if the behavior is being reinforced or punished, and in this case we can see the behavior being reinforced in one way or another. As parents we may not see how our reactions to behavior are shaping how our children act so conducting an ABC analysis of behavior can also hold a mirror up to our parenting styles and skills and can give us some insight on things to change as we aim to change the behavior of our children.