Introduction
Functional analysis (FA) is an assessment framework and a set of strategies to systematically integrate information about the form and function of clients’ behavior problems (O’Brien et al. 2016). The goal of FA is to identify important, controllable, and causal functional relationships between contextual events and a specified set of target behaviors.
A successful FA answers three key questions: What are problem behaviors? In what contexts those behaviors occur, maintain, and develop? What is the function of the behaviors in those contexts? To answer these three questions, functional analysis includes three elements. First, the therapist formulates measurable operational definitions of target behaviors, that is, behaviors that are closely related to presenting problems. Target behaviors include three modes of responding, including cognitive-verbal behaviors, physiological-affective...
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Zhu, Q., Black, D.A. (2019). Functional Analysis in Couple and Family Therapy. In: Lebow, J., Chambers, A., Breunlin, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Couple and Family Therapy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15877-8_83-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15877-8_83-1
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