Stereotypic and self-injurious behaviors are common forms of maladaptive responding demonstrated by severely handicapped persons. Various review papers suggest that no single treatment procedure is universally effective. Although there may be many reasons for this finding, one could be that people engage in these behaviors for various reasons, and that procedures that are incompatible with the cause of the behavior are unlikely to be effective. These studies also suggest many hypotheses for the development and maintenance of these behaviors, three of which are the self-stimulation, positive reinforcement, and negative reinforcement hypotheses. The purpose of this paper was to determine whether one of these hypotheses could be matched to the cause of the behavior and used as an effective treatment procedure. We therefore compared one hypothesis with one other for 3 subjects in a three-phase study. During baseline, data were taken in two classrooms for each subject, and a judgement was made about the hypothesis most likely to be related to the cause of the behavior. During the second phase, a treatment based on that hypothesis was used in one classroom, and a treatment based on another hypothesis was used in the second classroom. During the third phase, the treatment that was most effective in the second phase was used in both classrooms. Results showed that a successful treatment program can be developed on an hypothesis of why the behavior occurred during baseline. Results are discussed in terms of supporting the argument that treatment programs should be based on a functional analysis of the behavior in its environmental context.

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The relative effectiveness of two methods of programming DRO schedules of reinforcement was examined in two experiments. In these two methods, reinforcement is delivered if inappropriate responding is not occurring (a) at the end of an interval (momentary DRO), or (b) throughout the entire interval (whole-interval DRO). In Experiment 1, the effects of these schedules on disruptive responding of three retarded students were assessed in a multiple-baseline design. For two students, the momentary schedule occurred first and was ineffective, whereas the whole interval that followed was effective; for the third student, the whole-interval schedule occurred first and was effective, and reduced responding was maintained under the momentary schedule. In Experiment 2, baseline and the two DRO schedules were each presented in random order each day to one student in an alternating treatments design. The momentary DRO schedule reduced responding, but the whole-interval schedule was more effective.

Data representing high, medium, and low response rates in constant and nonconstant patterns were generated by electromechanical equipment to determine whether the same data collected by time-sampling, interval recording, and frequency recording would be represented similarly by each method. Results indicated: (1) that time-sampling provided an extremely inaccurate estimate of responding, and (2) that interval recording accurately represented responding of low and medium rates, but grossly underestimated high-rate responding.

We conducted a functional assessment of problem behaviors of 2 students with developmental disabilities in their classroom environments. Results of the assessments showed that although there were more tantrums in demand than in no-demand conditions, the function of the behavior was to gain attention (positive reinforcement) rather than to avoid or escape demands (negative reinforcement); demand conditions apparently served a discriminative function for the availability of attention. Therefore, intervention was based on the positive reinforcement hypothesis, resulting in a substantial reduction of tantrums for both subjects.