What is Behavior Analysis?
Behavior Analysis is the science that studies how major aspects of the environment (especially the social environment; e.g., what people say to you, what they do in response to your behavior) interact with and influence our own continuously evolving behavior. The contribution of genetic and other physiological variables in co-determining behavior is acknowledged, although these areas are the study of other sciences and thus not our major focus.
Out of basic laboratory research studying fundamental learning processes, behavior analysts produced a body of scientific concepts pertaining to many forms of behavior in many circumstances. This knowledge enabled behavior analysts in a variety of disciplinary fields (e.g., psychology, human development, special education, business management) to conduct applied research and develop applications designed to teach new skills, motivate and strengthen existing desirable behavior, and improve behavior problems of many kinds. This area is called applied behavior analysis.
Behavior analysis retains strong ties to the academic research community. In fact, peer-reviewed scientific journals are still the basic means of communicating new knowledge. (Check out the homepages of our flagship research journals, the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior and the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis). Behavior analysts with research interests work in universities; those interested purely in application and technology work in public sector human service jobs, or in the private sector, helping people with issues such as performance management in business, behavioral treatment for various behavior disorders, or applications in education and skill acquisition.
The behavioral approach is contextualistic and pragmatic in its orientation, empirical and data-based in its assessment methods, and humane and effective in its treatment techniques.