A comparison of the effectiveness of brief versus traditional functional analyses

The study compared a brief and an extended (i.e., traditional) functional analyses with three adults with serious developmental disabilities. Two of the subjects exhibited high levels of aggressive behavior, whereas the third engaged in self-injury. Both analyses examined conditions such as tangible reinforcement, attention, demand, alone and play (i.e., baseline). The brief functional analysis also included functional communication training in which the subjects learned a relevant mand. The brief and extended functional analyses revealed the same controlling variables in all cases, but the brief functional analyses took less than 20% of the time in analog conditions as the extended analyses. These results further the case for the utility of brief functional analyses. We caution, however, that behavior analysts should not generalize from a study that involved only three subjects and that brief functional analyses may be particularly sensitive to establishing operations.