The Behavioral Observations Podcast with Matt Cicoria The Ethics of Procedural Fidelity: Session 272 with Claire St. Peter
Schools Reveal Implementation Challenges
- Claire St. Peter observed that teachers often don't implement complex reinforcement schedules exactly as written.
- This led her to investigate what happens when behavior analytic procedures are implemented with errors.
Measure Fidelity Across Phases
- Procedural fidelity should be measured across all stages, not just treatment phases.
- Errors can occur in baseline, intervention, or withdrawal phases, affecting outcomes and interpretation.
Distinguish Error Types Clearly
- Understand errors of omission as missing steps and commission as adding unauthorized steps in implementation.
- Recognize commission errors often cause more harm than omission errors in behavioral interventions.
Whether one calls it Procedural Fidelity, Treatment Integrity, or any combination of those, and/or many other related terms, this is an important and often overlooked issue when it comes to implementing behavior analytic interventions.
Think about it for a minute: as practitioners, we spend all this time obsessing about what assessment strategy to use and what interventions we think are the best fit for the individuals we serve. As you'll come to find out, we spend comparatively less time on ensuring that the programs we write are being implemented correctly.
So it is with this in mind that I'm grateful that Dr. Claire St. Peter returned to the podcast to discuss her research in this area of procedural Fidelity.
In this episode, we talk about why she prefers the term "Procedural Fidelity," the types of behavior plans that are difficult for teachers to implement, the different types of procedural errors one can make, the impact these different errors have, what types of intervention plans are more vs. less resistant to reductions in procedural fidelity, why this is a topic that practitioners should care about, whether to measure procedural fidelity via rate or percent correct, and regardless of method, how behavior analysts can start tracking procedural fidelity right away.
We also talk about Claire's research in this area, going back to the work she did as part of her dissertation. We also talk about the state of reporting procedural fidelity in the behavior-analytic research literature.
Lastly, I think it's important to point out that this topic is replete with ethical implications, which is why I titled this episode the way I did. When I listened to the show, I kept track of the various code elements that were indirectly outlined or addressed. For the mentors in the audience, this might be a fun exercise to do with your supervisees.
Here are the resources discussed in this episode:
- Session 269/193: Claire's episode on Constructional Approaches to behavioral intervention.
- A link to Claire's multiple BOP appearances.
- Claire's lab website.
- On Claire's site, a section where you can download examples of Procedural Fidelity checklists and related resources.
- Bergmann et al., (2023). A detailed examination of reporting procedural fidelity in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis.
- Han et al., (2022). Trends in Reporting Procedural Integrity: A Comparison.
- Jones et al., (2023). Effects of Commission and Omission Errors on the Efficacy of Noncontingent Reinforcement.
- Jones and St. Peter (2022). Nominally acceptable integrity failures negatively affect interventions involving intermittent reinforcement.
- St. Peter et al. (2023). On a persisting curious double standard in behavior analysis: Behavioral scholars' perspectives on procedural fidelity.
- Kranak and Falligant (2023). Treatment Integrity, Commission Errors, and Reinstatement: A Primer.
- Campbell and Skinner (2008). Combining Explicit Timing with an Interdependent Group Contingency Program to Decrease Transition Times.
This episode was brought to you with support from:
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