A Multi-Dimensional Model for Conceptualizing the Design of Child Behavior Therapy

Abstract

Four dimensions thought to be basic to all child behavior therapy are specified. These are: (a) manipulation of the consequences of inappropriate behavior; (b) short-term prevention by ecological change; (c) teaching more appropriate alternatives and (d) long-term prevention by remedying more fundamental behavioral deficits. It is proposed that all four dimensions are needed for the design of any clinical treatment. The model therefore illustrates how ostensibly opposing intervention strategies in behavior therapy are really complementary. Since children's clinical problems rarely occur as isolated behaviors, and since behavioral psychotherapy involves development of more adaptive skills that influence the target problems indirectly, the dimensional model allows cross-referencing of the interrelated target behaviors in the child-client's repertoire. This is illustrated by describing typical intervention designs for two children with behavior problems. By formally specifying the realities of clinical treatment design, the relevance of therapy outcome research to clinical practice should be enhanced.

We Would If We Could: Examining Culturally Responsive Teaching Self-Efficacy in a Middle School Mathematics Methods Course

“…These beliefs are important to consider because teacher self-efficacy can predict future classroom actions. Specifically, self-efficacy is necessary to put acquired skills into action (Evans, 1989). Teachers must have confidence in their ability to implement the skills they acquire from their teacher education program before they can successfully implement the skills in the classroom.…”

Expanding the Functional Assessment Model for Naturalistic Intervention Design

“…It was essentially this type of reasoning that led me to suggest that a good intervention plan needed to address, simultaneously, four broad elements of a challenging behavior (Evans, 1989): manipulating the stimulus conditions (ecology) in which the behavior is more or less likely, modifying the consequences of the behavior, teaching a more appropriate way to obtain roughly those same consequences, and regulating the needs that made those consequences so excessively desirable in the first place. We can, for instance, modify an aggressive behavior by simultaneously implementing these four intervention components.…”

Constructional perspectives in clinical assessment.

“…A child with conduct disorder might benefit from (a) ecological interventions that pro-mote opportunity for reinforcement of prosocial behaviors already in the repertoire (such as joining an after-school adventure club) (see O'Donnell & Tharp, 1990, for a discussion of community from an assets' perspective), (b) the teaching of alternative skills that have the same function as fighting and destructiveness (such as communicating feelings; e.g., Durand, 1990), (c) the development of empathy as an antidote to negative behaviors (Strayer, 1989), and (d) noncontingent love and affection from parents and teachers to alter the motivational-cognitive set that feeling good about oneself comes from being the center of peer attention (Bowlby, 1988). Note that these are not alternative intervention strategies, but they are required in parallel (Evans, 1989). Widely promoted interventions such as parent training focusing only on contingency management would clearly be undesirable (Kazdin, 1987).…”