Functional Assessment

Functional assessment is the only way we should be describing and diagnosing behaviors. When I work with clients, I send out a questionnaire form that utilizes functional assessment to better understand the situation. What is it? It’s a process to develop ideas about the functional relations between behaviors and the environment. Behavior is never random, and it’s from environmental events (people are a part of the environment).

I focus on operant behaviors, behavior dependent on the consequences, because that is what fuels behavior for better or worse. Operant behavior is also the smallest unit of analysis using antecedent (what happens before the behavior), behavior, consequences (what comes after either desirable to the animal or not).

There are a few simple questions that can get you started on functional assessment of operant behaviors:
1) what does the problem look like in term of the behavior seen (describe the behavior without using labels and concepts like aggression, anxiety, dominance, etc.)
2) when does the animal do these behaviors (finding the antecedent)
3) what does the animal get/get away from after preforming this behavior (finding the consequences that are desirable or not)
4) what behavior would you like to see instead

This will get you in the mindset to start tackling behavior, or better ask me questions. FA will get you thinking in terms of science and not emotions, as I know we can get very emotional when our animals are doing undesirable behaviors. It will disallow you to think generally, as a description of “aggressive” can mean a lot of different things to different people and doesn’t describe behavior.