The FBA That Skipped the Function
A 9-year-old receives a functional behavior assessment after three incidents of hitting a peer in the cafeteria. The assessment consists of a records review, a 20-minute interview with the teacher, and the school's standard questionnaire, which yields a hypothesis of "attention-seeking." The behavior plan requires the student to earn points for quiet lunch and lose points for hitting, with a daily note home. Two weeks later hitting has increased to five incidents, and the student now also throws food. The parent calls the behavior analyst demanding to know why the plan is failing. The cafeteria is loud, lunch is the student's only unstructured time with preferred peers, and the student has been observed leaving the table to find a peer who was absent on incident days.
1. Evaluate the adequacy of this FBA against indirect and direct assessment standards. What is missing, and what function is plausible given the details?
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The FBA is thin in ways that matter. It used only indirect methods: record review, a single teacher interview, and a generic questionnaire that likely has no norms for this student or setting. There was no direct observation in the cafeteria, no structured functional analysis or at least a descriptive analysis with conditional probability data, and no verification of the hypothesis. The questionnaire's "attention-seeking" label is a guess dressed as a conclusion.
The details point to a plausible social positive reinforcement function, but with a specific form: access to a preferred peer. The student leaves the table to find an absent peer, and hitting occurs in an unstructured, loud setting where adult attention is diluted. Throwing food after the plan began is consistent with extinction-induced variability: the plan may have blocked the route to the peer, and the behavior escalated and diversified. The point-loss component is a punishment contingency layered onto an unverified hypothesis, and it may function as attention for a student whose reinforcer is peer contact.
Missing: direct observation with antecedent-behavior-consequence recording in the cafeteria, a preference or peer assessment, conditional probability analysis of what follows hitting, and a test of the peer-access hypothesis before designing treatment.
2. Design a defensible next step: what assessment would you run, and how would you restructure the plan pending results?
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Run a brief descriptive functional assessment in the natural setting first: 15-20 minutes of direct observation across at least five lunches, recording antecedents (peer presence, noise level, seating), behavior, and consequences (peer reaction, adult reaction, access to peer). Compute conditional probabilities, for example the proportion of hitting followed by peer interaction versus adult reprimand. If the descriptive data are ambiguous, conduct a brief functional analysis with a trained confederate peer in a quiet room, comparing contingent peer attention, contingent adult attention, escape from demands, and a control condition, with the parent's informed consent and a stop criterion for escalation.
Pending results, restructure the plan to be non-punitive and function-based: (1) provide a scheduled, contingent route to the preferred peer, such as a peer-buddy seating arrangement or a brief peer interaction earned by staying seated; (2) teach a functionally equivalent replacement, such as a card or script requesting to sit with a friend; (3) reduce the point-loss component, which is unsupported and may be feeding the escalation; (4) keep the daily note but reframe it as communication, not a punishment channel. Use a reversal or alternating-treatments design to compare the restructured plan with the current one, and report progress to the parent in plain language.