What is behavioral assessment?

Introduction

Behavioral assessment arose from behavioral research, which offered explanations of human behavior that differed from traditional theories. For example, early behaviorists believed that a person’s behavior was the appropriate focus for understanding the person, while other psychologists believed that behavior was only a symbolic representation of an unconscious conflict. Rating scales were developed by psychologists interested in behavioral assessment and in determining the intensity of a behavior experienced by a person.

Traditional assessment approaches describe a person as having a particular trait or characteristic. For example, a person might be described as having an authority conflict or an anxious personality. In contrast, behavioral assessment describes the person’s behavior in specific situations. For example, the behavioral assessment might say, “When the person is given an order by a superior, the person argues and makes sarcastic remarks.” The behavioral assessment would go on to describe the consequences of arguing and talking back, which could be anything from the superior withdrawing the order to the superior punishing the person who argued.

Contemporary behavioral assessment is concerned with both internal and external events. Marvin Goldfried describes a model of behavioral assessment that includes a systematic analysis of internal and external events. Four classes of variables are assessed in this model: stimulus antecedents, organismic variables, response variables, and consequent variables. Stimulus antecedents refer to the environmental events that precede the occurrence of the target behavior. Sometimes called discriminative stimuli, they may be either external or internal. An example of an external event that serves as a stimulus antecedent is drinking a cup of coffee, which may serve as a discriminative stimulus for lighting a cigarette. An internal event that might serve as a prompt for an emotional response is thinking about taking a test, which may result in a feeling of anxiety. Both internal and external stimulus antecedents can produce behaviors that are experienced as either external (observable) or internal (unobservable).

This model of behavioral assessment includes a thorough description of organismic variables. These variables include anything that is personally relevant and could influence the response to the stimulus antecedents. Both acute and chronic medical conditions that may affect the perception of or response to the discriminative stimuli are noted. The influence of the person’s genetic makeup is assessed when it seems relevant to the target behavior. Finally, the person’s learning history is considered to be important in understanding the response to the antecedent stimuli. Organismic variables serve as mediators or filters between the stimulus antecedents and the responses.

Response variables are the person’s behaviors in response to the stimulus antecedents and filtered through the organismic variables. The response variables are considered to be part of the triple-response system. The triple-response system requires the assessment of behavior in each of three domains: motor, physiological, and cognitive-emotional. Motor behavior refers to the observable actions of the person. Examples of motor behavior include lighting a cigarette, leaving a room, and throwing a temper tantrum. Physiological responses are unobservable behaviors that can be made observable by using specialized instruments. Heart rate is an unobservable physiological response until an instrument detects and displays it. Cognitive and emotional responses are also unobservable events. The behavioral assessment of these responses requires the person to report his or her own thoughts and feelings in the presence of the stimulus antecedents.

The triple-response system is important from the perspectives of both assessment and treatment. Although behaviorists have historically focused on motor behavior, it is well known that people experience physiological changes and cognitive-emotional changes concurrently with the motor behavior in the presence of the stimulus antecedents. As behavioral assessment has become more sophisticated, it has become apparent that the relative importance of the components of the triple-response system varies in different people. Thus, treatment may focus on cognition in one person because it is the most important behavior and on physiological responses in another.

The final component of this model of behavioral assessment requires a consideration of consequent variables, which are the events that follow a response. These variables are important in determining whether the response will be continued or discontinued. The consequences of a response also determine the strength of the response. Any consequence that leads to a reward for the person is positive reinforcement and will strengthen the response it follows. Rewards may include getting something one wants (for example, studying results in a good grade on a test) or ending something that is unpleasant (for example, leaving a situation results in reduced anxiety). Consequences that do not reward or reinforce the person lead to a weakening of the behavior.

The goal of behavioral assessment is to describe fully the problem behavior and the events that surround it. Although earlier approaches tried to limit the assessment to one or two behaviors identified as problems, more recent approaches apply the assessment methodology to clusters of behaviors that may form syndromes or diagnostic categories.

A variety of observational methods are used to gather the information that constitutes a behavioral assessment. Naturalistic observation is used to observe the person’s behavior in the settings most germane to the behaviors of interest, such as home, school, work, or a hospital. In self-monitoring, the person observes and records each instance of the behavior of interest. Researchers use role-playing and controlled observations to study the behaviors of interest while maintaining more control over the environment than is possible with naturalistic observation. Rating scales are also used to determine the intensity of the behavior under study.

Uses and Interpretations

Behavioral assessment has many uses in psychology. There are three major ways of interpreting the data obtained from these assessment procedures. Client-referenced interpretation compares two different performances of the same task by the same person. The simplest example is a comparison of pretreatment and posttreatment performance to see if the person improved after the intervention. There is no consideration of how other people perform the task. Criterion-referenced interpretation compares the person’s performance to a previously established level of acceptable performance. Finally, norm-referenced interpretations compare an individual’s performance to normative data; thus, it is possible to learn how a person compares to all others for whom norms are available. The comparison could be with everyone who has completed the task or taken the test in the normative sample or with specific age or ethnic groups, genders, or occupational groups. Norm-referenced interpretations can be used to compare an individual to any group for which norms are available. It is up to the psychologist to ensure that the normative group used for comparison is one that is appropriate for the person being evaluated.

Behavioral assessment has been used in industrial and organizational settings. A 1990 study by Robert P. Bush and others described a procedure for developing a scale to assess the performance of people working in retail sales. Another 1990 study, by Richard Reilly and others, described the use of a behavioral assessment procedure within the context of an assessment center. Assessment centers are established by businesses to simulate the tasks associated with different positions. It is assumed that superior performance in the assessment center will translate into superior performance on the job. Reilly and others demonstrated that by incorporating behavioral assessment procedures—namely, checklists—into the assessment center procedures, the validity of the assessment center results was improved.

The clinical use of behavioral assessment procedures is quite extensive and includes both children and adults. Thomas Ollendick and Greta Francis have reviewed the use of behavioral assessment techniques in the assessment and treatment of children with phobias. These authors provide examples of how to obtain information about fears and phobias from children by asking them questions in both direct and indirect ways. A variety of rating scales are reviewed, including the Fear Survey Schedule for Children and the Children’s Manifest Anxiety Scale. The Fear Survey Schedule for Children consists of eighty items pertaining to childhood fears, which the child rates on a scale ranging from “none” to “a lot.” Normative data are available for children between the ages of seven and sixteen years. It is possible to obtain information about fear of failure, fear of the unknown, fear of danger and death, and so on. The Children’s Manifest Anxiety Scale measures the extent of anxiety that the child feels. This scale assesses the child’s anxiety in the domains of physiological responsiveness, worry/oversensitivity, and concentration and is appropriate for children between the ages of six and eighteen years.

Other scales for children, reviewed by Larry D. Evans and Sharon Bradley-Johnson, assess adaptive behavior. Adaptive behavior is the degree to which a child is able to cope effectively with the environment based on his or her age. Deficits in adaptive behavior are an important part of the definition of intellectual disability. These authors review several measures of adaptive behavior that were completed by teachers, caregivers, and psychologists. Comparisons are made to existing scales assessing adaptive behavior. Rating scales are used to measure various behaviors in adolescents and children. In addition to the behaviors mentioned above, there are rating scales for attention and distractibility, autism, and various psychiatric syndromes.

Randall Morrison describes a variety of rating scales that assess adult
psychopathology. They include scales of schizophrenic symptoms that are completed by a psychologist who interviews and observes the person suspected of having schizophrenia. A scale of global adjustment is also reviewed by Morrison. This 100-point rating scale, which focuses on the extent to which the person has coped effectively with environmental events during the past year, is useful with a wide variety of psychiatric patients. According to Morrison, it has some value in predicting how well a person will cope after treatment, as well as in assessing the effectiveness of the treatment.

There are many rating scales for children, adolescents, and adults. They assess a wide range of behaviors and vary in the degree to which they have been constructed with attention to the standards for test development and the compilation of appropriate norms.

The Development of Behavioral Assessment

The history of psychological assessment is replete with examples of attempts to measure people's characteristics and traits, which are defined as underlying psychological processes that are pervasive aspects of personality. In fact, for many psychologists, characteristics and traits define the personality. Traditional approaches to psychotherapy try to identify the traits to develop a therapeutic strategy that will reveal the unconscious conflicts.

Unlike traditional approaches to psychological assessment and psychotherapy, behavioral assessment arose from the need of behavior therapists to describe more completely the events surrounding the problem behavior. The history of behavior therapy
is one of defining a target behavior and designing a program to change the behavior. As behavior therapy developed and became more sophisticated, it became apparent that more information was needed to identify the antecedent stimuli, the organismic filters that were operating, which aspect of the triple-response system was relevant, and what the consequences of the target behavior were. In response to that need, behavioral assessment was developed. Initially, behavioral assessment was rather straightforward and did not bother much with the procedures of psychological test construction, since the process itself was one of observing behavior rather than making inferences about behavior from test responses. As behavioral assessment has matured, it has become more concerned with meeting the standards of test construction applied to other assessment methods and has become more sophisticated and complex.

Behavioral assessment is used to measure clusters of behaviors and syndromes rather than merely isolated problem behaviors. More attention is paid to the extent to which standards of validity and reliability are met. Psychologists are putting behavioral assessment to the test of demonstrating its worth as an assessment procedure; to justify its use, it must add something to the understanding of the person being assessed. The challenge is being met, and behavioral assessment continues to provide valuable information about the person being assessed. Information obtained is useful in determining the extent to which certain behaviors are problems. Other information is used in determining the personality of the individual, with all the attendant traits and characteristics.

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