Edited by author 06-24-2009 05:41 AM
Finally in response to Sharon (
/m9296 and
http://thefamilyvoyage.blogspot.com/2009/0...#c82852606006714015 )... with apologies for taking so long.
ABA is a huge field including areas like traffic safety and Organizational Behavior Management that I don't know much about. There's also the experimental analysis of behaviour (which is not exclusively animal work, but there is a lot of it...). The big questions you raise are good questions to ask, but so far I have been more concerned, as a priority, with specific areas of ABA.
And so far what I've done is take ABA seriously as a science. In my view, autism advocates (including behaviour analysts) have not in fact done this, any more than they have taken autism seriously. And this allows me to bring in recognized standards of science and ethics and see whether they have been applied to autistics in the ABA literature.
This in turn might end up being informative about ABA in general, or at least, more generally than just in the area of autism. In fact I think it has been, but having thought about it, I am not sure making this point is a priority just now (and it might be a distraction).
The problems in the literature re ABA-based autism interventions are [flails around for large enough adjective] enormous, and very serious, and have affected the general area of autism intervention research. This is more the direction in which I've expanded things, so to speak. I see the general question of the quality of autism intervention research, in which the ABA literature has played a pervasive and decisive role, as a big deal, more so than any attempt to tackle the entire edifice of ABA.
I mention Gina Green's inability to tell autism and cancer apart here
http://autismcrisis.blogspot.com/2006/11/spotting-difference.html The foreward by Dr Green that I refer to is almost entirely a lengthy claim by her that autism and cancer are exactly the same thing. This is a good example of how behaviour analysts can and do discard any trace of science, and of ethics, in their effort to promote the services they provide.
By the way, I am not disagreeing at all that there are many things which could call into question ABA's status as a science, but I am sticking with areas of ABA where I am well-informed.
In the area of autism, there for sure is evidence that all is not well that extends beyond the very poor quality of the published research. This includes the isolation of behaviour analysts from all other areas of autism science, and the ways in which behaviour analysts have responded to criticism.
As someone who reads a lot, and works in, non-ABA fields of science, I find ABA, at least in the areas I know well, to be strikingly ideological. The numerous, persistent and totally false claims that because I criticize the science and ethics of ABA-based autism interventions, I must be "anti-ABA" (or words to that effect) are very telling in this respect. In contrast, I have never been accused of being "anti-cognitive-science" or "anti-cognitive-neuroscience" even though I have been a much harsher and more effective critic of the scientific and ethical standards in these fields.
In fact long ago (in my distant youth...) I made the error of assuming that my criticism of ABA-based interventions would be responded to, by those promoting ABA-based interventions, in ways consistent with the notion that ABA is a science, rather than an ideology. But of course that has not been the case.
