Impacts of Integrity Failures on Common Reinforcement-Based Interventions

Description

The term treatment integrity refers to the extent to which interventions are implemented as they are designed. For over 20 years, there have been calls for increased reporting of treatment integrity in research and consideration of treatment integrity in clinical practice. Yet, treatment integrity remains an infrequent research topic and rare practice consideration. In this presentation, I describe several studies evaluating levels of treatment integrity across commonly used, reinforcement-based interventions for challenging behavior. I hope to convince the audience that evaluations of treatment integrity are critical for research and practice if we hope to create sustainable change in socially significant behavior.

About the Speaker

Dr. St. Peter is a professor and area coordinator in behavior analysis, as well as the director of graduate training at West Virginia University (WVU). She received her Ph.D. in psychology with a specialization in behavior analysis in 2006 from the University of Florida. During her graduate training, she worked under the supervision of Timothy R. Vollmer. Dr. St. Peter joined the faculty at WVU in fall of 2006, and was promoted to associate professor in 2012.