Behavior analytic methods

Abstract

Behavior analysts typically conceptualize social skills as behaviors, or series of behaviors, that mediate the responses of others. As such, practitioners may assess and teach social skills using the principles of learning derived from operant conditioning (e.g., positive reinforcement). In the current chapter, we first discuss the conceptualization of social skills from a behavior analytic standpoint. That is, social skills are behaviors that are evoked by environmental stimuli and reinforced by others. Next, we describe behavioral assessments that may be useful to conduct prior to teaching social skills to children such as task analysis, preference assessment, and functional assessment. Finally, we review teaching strategies that may be adopted by practitioners to teach the social skills identified by assessments. These strategies include prompting, fading, chaining, shaping, and discrete trial training. We also discuss how to adapt reinforcement schedules to teach social skills and present multiple methods to promote the generalization of the newly learned skills.