Abstract
This chapter reviews legal and research definitions of restraint and restrictive behavior management practices. It distinguishes between culturally appropriate and culturally inappropriate forms of restraint and restrictive behavior management practices. Culturally appropriate forms of restraint and restrictive behavior management practices may include certain forms of child behavior management, restraint in medical and similar contexts, and legally sanctioned practices and legal sanctions which often restrict movement. Restraint may include physical, personal, chemical, and other forms of restraint. Two common forms of restrictive behavior management practices are seclusion and time-out. Concern over these practices is now often voiced in terms of human rights. The reasons for these practices include ensuring the safety of the person and others around them, that these practices are a form of treatment. Data generally do not support the belief that restrictive behavior management practices are safe.
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Notes
- 1.
Shaping, sometimes known as the “method of successive approximations” is a behavioral procedure which involves reinforcement of better and better approximations to a final behavioral goal and extinction of previously reinforced responses. Extinction refers to no longer reinforcing responses that were previously reinforced.
- 2.
Shadowing is a behavioral prompting procedure used to fade (reduce) physical prompts. In shadowing, the trainer systematically reduces physical prompts by following the trainee’s movements with their hands very closely at first and gradually increasing the distance little by little, following the student’s movements with her hands very near but not touching the child. The teacher then gradually increases the distance of her hands from the student.
- 3.
Non-exclusionary time-out refers to procedures in which the reinforcer maintaining the problem behavior is removed contingent on the behavior, but, in contrast to exclusionary time-out procedures, the person is not excluded from the setting in which the problem behavior occurred.
- 4.
“Tell–show–do” is a behavior management strategy used in dentistry to reduce anxiety which involves instruction, modelling and use of a dental procedure.
- 5.
Negative punishment is a behavioral procedure in which a stimulus is removed contingent on that response that results in the future weakening of behavior.
- 6.
Pica refers to eating inedible objects.
- 7.
Functional assessment and functional analysis are a set of procedures to identify the environmental variables that influence a target behavior. Functional assessment does not involve any systematic manipulation of variables whereas functional analysis does. These procedures are used before treatment and used to identify indicated and contraindicated treatments (Sturmey 1996; Sturmey 2007).
- 8.
Restraint is also used widely in the animal literature as a procedure to study stress. For example, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3779531/.
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Sturmey, P. (2015). Definitions and Rationales. In: Reducing Restraint and Restrictive Behavior Management Practices. Autism and Child Psychopathology Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17569-0_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17569-0_1
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