The Case of Bob

The Case of Bob

The Case of Bob

In this week's Instructor Contact Session, your instructor talks about baseline and treatment phases. Listen to the lecture and take notes. Then post a substantive response to the following discussion question:

In this unit, you read the full article, Escape as a Factor in the Aggressive Behavior of Two Retarded Children, which shows the effect of a teacher's demands on Bob's aggressive behavior, as well as on another student named Sam. Figure 1 in the journal article provides the A-B-A-B graphs for both Bob and Sam.

1. Compare and contrast these two graphs in terms of baseline and treatment phases. Include in your discussion a description of the type of baselines (for example, stable, ascending, descending, or variable) that were obtained for each child.

2. What is your conclusion about the baselines presented?
3. Provide recommendations about improving the design, if appropriate.

The effect caused by aggression as human behavior is regarded as the greatest social concern in modern society. High-frequency aggressive behaviors have a common effect of disrupting the normal family functioning as well as making children be untouchable in their respective schools (Carr, Newsom, & Binkoff, 1980). Thus, as outlined in Miltenberger text while describing the cases of Bob and Sam, it is clear that these negative effects have made many children be taken out of the mainstream society. This has led to them being taken to institutions for disciplinary actions as witnessed in the two case studies described in the text.

From the two discussion graphs shown in the text, it can be clearly identified that the baseline reference point was the ability of Bob and Sam to respond to each experimental conditions. Therefore, it can be seen that the frequency of aggression acts for Bob was increasing during the demand condition while descending when there were no demands. Thus, the same trend was witnessed when Sam was subjected to the same demands but on a different time frame. On the other hand, in sessions when there was no safety signals their aggressive behavior was on a high with a recorded mean of 91.1 percent (Miltenberger, 2011). These results reduced when there was a safety signal showing that aggressiveness was just a notion possessed by the two students. However, the treatment phases showed significant but minimal changes in their aggressive behaviors as shown in the graphs since Bob and Sam responded in the same way when demands and food were put as a control measure (Miltenberger, 2011).

In conclusion, the baseline provided shows little on the causative agents of the aggressive behaviors, and as a result, it is difficult to prescribe the best treatment for the two. Therefore, in order to improve the design more measures on the issues that lead on to aggression must be critically analyzed and used an experimental method of data collection.

References
Carr, E. G., Newsom, C. D., & Binkoff, J. A. (1980). Escape as a factor in the aggressive behavior of two retarded children. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 13(1), 101-117.

Miltenberger, R. G. (2011). Behavior Modification: Principles and procedures. Cengage Learning.