Getting out the news: a review of the How to Manage Behavior series

✍ Scribed by Eric M. Butter

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2001
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 64 KB
• Volume: 16
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1072-0847
• DOI: 10.1002/bin.92

✦ Synopsis

As an applied science, psychology is in a state of relative infancy. Behavior scientists have developed a wide range of technology, solidly derived from a parsimonious theoretical base, which could serve, and often does, as effective mechanisms of behavior change. However, most of this knowledge remains inaccessible to the general public amidst the pages of the academic journals on our dusty library shelves. Many helping and teaching professionals do not have the tools necessary to use and disseminate principles of applied behavior analysis or operant behavior theory in meaningful ways in their day to day professional practice. Behavior change agents (i.e. parents, teachers, coaches, managers, trainees in the helping professions) often leave training or therapy sessions with good ideas about behavior modi®cation, usually in the form of speci®c techniques. More dif®cult to impart to a lay audience in a short training seminar or therapy session is a command of the basic principles of behavior theory, which would allow them to customize and modify a behavioral intervention geared toward their speci®c problem. The struggle for the behavioral trainer is to move trainees beyond explicitly manualized techniques toward solid technical knowledge.

The How to Manage Behavior series, now in its second edition with additional titles, is one resource that has been available to assist in the sharing and teaching of applied behavior analysis. The series includes 16 different titles on various topics related to behavior change, collated in pamphlet sized booklets ranging from 30 to 70 pages in length. Each volume, more or less, provides a non-technical description of a behavior change strategy. The editors and collaborating authors have craftily twined