Response interruption and redirection: A scoping review of its procedural permutations and participant pools.

Abstract

Behaviors maintained by automatic reinforcement pose unique challenges for behavior analysts because identifying and controlling the maintaining consequence variables can be difficult or even impossible. Response interruption and redirection (RIRD) is an evidence-based procedure to reduce such behaviors (Dowdy et al., 2020). While this intervention approach has been reviewed, those previous reviews of the literature have not analyzed the various methodologies across RIRD applications or identified whether RIRD has been applied to a diverse sampling of participants. The purpose of this scoping review was to code RIRD experiments across additional dimensions from previous reviews and include applications to several topographies of behaviors maintained by automatic reinforcement across studies and individuals. Across four databases, peer-reviewed articles were included for review if they were published in English, reported individual participant data (including baseline), and manipulated RIRD as an independent variable. The search was completed in April 2022. A total of 43 articles, for a total number of 123 participants, were included. We found that, while target participants and dependent variables often overlap, RIRD procedures varied across experiments. Our findings suggest that RIRD experiments would benefit from evaluation of different procedural variations. Limitations are discussed.