A common term in ABA is ‘Challenging Behavior’ or sometimes ‘behaviors that challenge.’
Challenging behaviour can be defined as:
Culturally abnormal behaviour(s) of such an intensity, frequency or duration that the physical safety of the person or others is likely to be placed in serious jeopardy, or behaviour which is likely to seriously limit use of, or result in the person being denied access to, ordinary community facilities (Emerson, 1995).
The terms are supposed to emphasise that what makes a behaviour challenging is the fact that it poses a challenge to the people and services who have a duty towards the person demonstrating the behaviour. Challenging behaviour is inherently relational.
For example:
Imagine an autistic child who is taught in a mainstream classroom. The child may sometimes make droning noises in the classroom. Making these noises does not appear to negatively impact on the child’s learning. However, his teacher or peers may find the behaviour distracting or irritating. It may impact negatively on the quality of the teacher’s teaching or the other students’ learning. The autistic child’s behaviour poses a challenge to his teacher and to the school.
There is no official list of challenging behaviours. It is context that makes a behaviour challenging. The ‘problem’ is not in the individual, but in some aspect of their environment. A behaviour may challenge parents, carers, friends or services, but simultaneously, it may be functional for the person engaging in the behaviour.
In the above example, the autistic child’s behaviour may have helped them to concentrate or to cope with an otherwise stressful environment. In other cases, a behaviour that challenges others may help the person engaging in the behaviour to gain assistance or to create sensory stimulation.
However, people who engage in behaviors that challenge often experience outcomes that negatively affect their quality of life. For example, a child with a disability to is ‘too noisy’ in class, may be excluded from school and denied an education. Carers may respond to incidents of aggressive or self-injurious behaviour by using physical or manual restraints. For those who need support, challenging behaviour can often result in some form of deprivation of liberty, family or placement breakdowns or abuse.
A Functional Behavior Assessment is a type of assessment that is designed to identify the reasons why a behaviour that challenges occurs. From our earlier modules, you understand that all behaviour happens for a reason. Challenging behaviour is no different. As part of a functional assessment, we seek to identify potential setting events, antecedents and consequences that may help to explain why a behaviour occurs. That is, the purpose of a Functional Assessment is to identify the function of a behaviour.
Using this information, we may be able to identify ways in which an environment can be changed to make a challenging behaviour unnecessary, inefficient or ineffective, while teaching alternative skills that can be used to achieve a similar ends.