Bryan D. Midgley

Some Historical and Conceptual Foundations of Ecobehavioral Analysis

As the behavioral sciences approach the next millenium, the leading edge of theory, research, and application will become increasingly ecological and contextualistic in world view. As a participant in the behavioral sciences, behavior analysis has already begun to evolve in these important new directions and has done so in each of its three main branches: the conceptual analysis of behavior, the experimental analysis of behavior, and applied behavior analysis.

The history of behavior analysis: Some historiography and a bibliography.

This article has two main purposes. First, it introduces the discipline of historiography and, second, it provides a selected bibliography on the history of behavior analysis. In introducing the former in the context of the latter, four important methodological considerations involved in the process and product of historiography are described: The sources from which historical materials are drawn (i.e., primary, secondary, and tertiary) and three dimensions along which historiography is conducted and evaluated—internalist vs. externalist, great person vs. Zeitgeist, and presentist vs. historicist. Integrated throughout are four purposes for the historiography of behavior analysis, as well as an overview of the topics covered in the extant literature. The manuscript concludes with a listing of current bibliographic material by publication type and topic.

The Integrated Field: An Alternative to the Behavior-Analytic Conceptualization of Behavioral Units

Behavior is a continuous process from prior to birth until death. For purposes of investigation, however, it becomes useful to analyze this “behavior stream” into behavioral units, the description and definition of which have concerned behavioral scientists for many years. The present paper extends this topic further by presenting the integrated field as an appropriate behavioral unit, especially in contrast to the behavior-analytic units of respondent and operant behavior. We begin by providing some historical background on behavioral units as addressed by B. F. Skinner and the behavior-analytic community, and then we propose the integrated field as a more suitable unit in the context of three long-standing false dichotomies—organism vs. response as the subject matter, internal vs. external causation, and explanatory vs. descriptive analysis. In these matters, the integrated field emphasizes, respectively, a holistic, as opposed to organism- or response-based, subject matter; a systemic, as opposed to internally or externally oriented, description of causation; and a purely descriptive, as opposed to reductive-explanatory, analysis of behavior. We conclude with related comments regarding the relationship between an integrated-field perspective on the problem of behavioral units and research methodology in psychology.