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Notes
I am not the first to make this suggestion. Critchfield (2015) echoed this sentiment by arguing that Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS) may fall outside the domain of applied behavior analysis, but that distinction does not make PBIS research any less valuable.
Much like Reed and Critchfield (2017), I believe we should maintain distinctions between research and practice. Thus, like Reed and Critchfield, my suggestion pertains to research, not to practice.
Labeling ourselves as behavior analysts shares features with a proposed restructuring of language suggested by Iwata, Pace, Cowdery, and Miltenberger (1994) regarding extinction. In that paper, the authors argue that extinction may be misapplied because of labels like planned ignoring that emphasized the form of the procedure over the function. Iwata et al. recommended an alternative annotation that emphasizes process over form by using the label extinction and only parenthetically stating the form of the reinforcer. In this way, “planned ignoring” becomes “extinction (attention).” In parallel, instead of being an applied behavior analyst, I should be a behavior analyst (applied).
Although some would argue that even this distinction should be abandoned. See Vyse (2013) as an example.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Karen Anderson, Katherine Kestner, Henry Pennypacker, and the doctoral students working with me at West Virginia University for their insights about issues mentioned in this manuscript.
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St. Peter, C.C. Beyond Basic or Applied. BEHAV ANALYST 40, 193–196 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40614-017-0104-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40614-017-0104-y