Teaching Behavior Professionals to Use the Interview-Informed Synthesized Contingency Analysis (IISCA): A Preliminary Investigation

We assessed the implementation accuracy and fidelity of two board certified behavior analysts (BCBAs) using the open-ended interview from Hanley. Participants interviewed a confederate using the open-ended interview, and were then asked to use information gathered from the interview to create operational definitions of target behaviors as well as test and control condition procedures for a subsequent matched test-control functional analysis as is characteristic of the interview-informed synthesized contingency analysis (IISCA) strategy. Brief behavioral skills training (BST) was then implemented with all participants to increase the accuracy of constructing both target behavior definitions and functional analysis procedures. Preliminary results show moderate rates of accuracy of target behavior definitions and functional analysis procedures prior to BST, and high rates of accuracy following BST. The results also suggest high implementation fidelity on the open-ended interview may not be necessary to achieve high accuracy when constructing target behavior definitions and functional analysis procedures