Camilo Hurtado-Parrado

Clinical decision making and preference assessment for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Individuals with intellectual or developmental disabilities are able to reliably express their likes and dislikes through direct preference assessment. Preferred items tend to function as rewards and can therefore be used to facilitate the acquisition of new skills and promote task engagement. A number of preference assessment methods are available and selecting the appropriate method is crucial to provide reliable and meaningful results. The authors conducted a systematic review of the preference assessment literature, and developed an evidence-informed, decision-making model to guide practitioners in the selection of preference assessment methods for a given assessment scenario. The proposed decision-making model could be a useful tool to increase the usability and uptake of preference assessment methodology in applied settings.

Single-Case Research Methods: History and Suitability for a Psychological Science in Need of Alternatives

This paper presents a historical and conceptual analysis of a group of research strategies known as the Single-Case Methods (SCMs). First, we present an overview of the SCMs, their history, and their major proponents. We will argue that the philosophical roots of SCMs can be found in the ideas of authors who recognized the importance of understanding both the generality and individuality of psychological functioning. Second, we will discuss the influence that the natural sciences’ attitude toward measurement and experimentation has had on SCMs. Although this influence can be traced back to the early days of experimental psychology, during which incipient forms of SCMs appeared, SCMs reached full development during the subsequent advent of Behavior Analysis (BA). Third, we will show that despite the success of SCMs in BA and other (mainly applied) disciplines, these designs are currently not prominent in psychology. More importantly, they have been neglected as a possible alternative to one of the mainstream approaches in psychology, the Null Hypothesis Significance Testing (NHST), despite serious controversies about the limitations of this prevailing method. Our thesis throughout this section will be that SCMs should be considered as an alternative to NHST because many of the recommendations for improving the use of significance testing (Wilkinson & the TFSI, 1999) are main characteristics of SCMs. The paper finishes with a discussion of a number of the possible reasons why SCMs have been neglected.

The Scientometric Structure of Applied Behaviour Analysis

Social network analysis provides the basis for graphic representation and quantitative analysis of the interactions of complex social systems. Here we report on a new method for using social network analysis to study patterns of scientific activity and potential influence of research interaction groups – i.e., researchers who publish jointly –. Next, we discuss the application of this method to a leading journal in the field of applied behaviour analysis. Data on authors of co-authored articles in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis (JABA) and two comparison journals – the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology (JCCP), and the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescence Psychiatry (JAACAP) – published from 2000 to 2010 inclusive were considered to form a social network in a sociometric, or “scientiometric,” analysis. The analysis identified a small number of potentially influential groups or communities of authors publishing in JABA. It appears from this analysis that one of these research groups in particular has the potential to influence research trends in applied behaviour analysis (as represented by JABA authorship interactions). The research interaction groups are not highly specific in terms of the behaviours, procedures, or populations that they frequently deal with. The general scientometric structure found for JABA, consisting of one or two highly influential research interaction groups, no more than 10 active non-influential research interaction groups, and a mass of non-influential micro-communities, was similar to that in the comparison journals looked at in this study.

Causes of Behavioral Processes: An Interview with Mario A. Bunge

Mario A. Bunge is one of the most prominent philosophers and humanists of our time. His vast record of publications has covered, among others, episte -mology, ontology, ethics, philosophy of natural and social sciences, philoso -phy of technology, and philosophy of mind. A topic that intersects many of these areas and is recurrent in Bunge’s work is causality. His analyses of the causal principle, and the redefinition of determinism into near-determinism have been applied to different philosophical issues that range from the causal role of neuronal functioning to the laws of social phenomena. Bunge has criticized functionalism, cognitivism, computationalism, behaviourism, and idealism in their attempt to explain human and non-human behaviour. This article results from an extensive interview held with Dr. Bunge in which we discussed a variety of conceptual issues related to the notions of causality and explanation in psychology.