Denys Brand

California State University, Sacramento | CSUS · Department of Psychology

Preference assessment methodology has largely been utilized to inform behavior-analytic treatment for clinical populations. However, the use of preference assessments has been extended to organizational settings when developing performance management interventions and identifying preferred stimuli and activities that may serve as potential reinforc...

Treatment integrity is the extent to which procedures are implemented in a manner consistent with their prescribed protocols and is necessary for reaching accurate conclusions regarding functional relations between dependent (i.e., behavior) and independent (i.e., the environment) variables. Several studies assessing the frequency that studies repo...

Feedback is an effective strategy for improving performance and consists of multiple characteristics. One characteristic that can influence feedback efficacy is its nature (whether feedback is positive or corrective) and little is known about the conditions under which individuals may prefer corrective over positive feedback. Thus, the purpose of t...

The Performance Diagnostic Checklist - Human Services (PDC-HS) is an assessment designed to assess the environmental variables contributing to employee performance concerns in human-service settings. Recent research has demonstrated that interventions indicated by the PDC-HS result in improved employee performance across several human-service setti...

Procedural fidelity is the extent to which independent variables are implemented as designed. Despite 40 years of discussion about the importance of procedural fidelity for behavioral research, reporting of fidelity data remains an uncommon practice in behavior-analytic journals. Researchers have speculated about reasons for underreporting, but the...

Procedural integrity refers to the extent to which an independent variable is implemented as described. Measuring procedural integrity is one important factor when considering internal and external validity of experiments. Experimental articles in behavior-analytic journals have rarely reported procedural-integrity data. The purpose of this study w...

Feedback involves providing information about past performance and indicating how to improve future performance. Although the literature contains numerous examples of feedback as an effective method for improving performance across a range of organizational settings, much remains unknown about the specifics of how feedback acts to change behavior....

This experiment used a pyramidal training model to evaluate the effects of behavioral skills training (BST), delivered in a 1‐time group‐training format, on the extent to which 25 human service staff implemented BST when training others how to implement behavioral procedures. Results indicated that (a) the training workshop increased BST integrity...

We reviewed parametric analyses of treatment integrity levels published in 10 behavior analytic journals through 2017. A total of 19 experiments (13 articles) met criteria for review. The objectives were to: (1) determine the number of experiments in which levels of treatment integrity were systematically manipulated; (2) identify the types of erro...

Privacy has been identified as a primary concern among stakeholders (i.e., service recipients, advocates, administrators, family) when using technology to provide residential services to individuals in need. This paper summarizes a study that distributed a survey to agencies that provide services (e.g., clinical, recreational) and resources (e.g.,...

Treatment integrity is the extent to which interventionists implement treatment procedures as prescribed. The majority of treatment integrity research involving discrete-trial teaching (DTT) reports an overall score summarizing integrity across procedural components. Because DTT is a procedure consisting of multiple steps, practitioners may find it...

Our everyday lives contain numerous examples of the pursuit of quick fixes and fad treatments lacking objective research to support their use. The Internet is saturated with anecdotal stories of effectiveness and other false claims, which make it challenging to separate legitimate treatment options from offerings by “snake oil salesmen.” Humans are...

Discrete-trial teaching is a strategy frequently used to teach functional skills to individuals with developmental and intellectual disabilities. Research has shown that the within-trial components of the procedure should be administered with ≥90% treatment integrity to facilitate optimal learning. Usually within-trial treatment integrity is measur...

To date, research on the effects of providing sensory stimulating activities (e.g., multisensory environments) with persons with dementia has been inconclusive. We evaluated the behavioral effects of an occupational therapy program of individualized sensory-based activities (SBAs), in which activities were selected based on individuals’ sensory abi...

Engelman, Altus, and Mathews (1999) evaluated a procedure to ensure that staff checked in with elderly residents in a nursing home and offered activity choices. We report findings of a replication, with some additional components, to increase appropriate activity engagement among 5 residents (aged 77 to 83 years) with severe dementia. Evaluated in...

Discrete Trial Training (DTT) is one of the most effective training methods for children diagnosed with Autism. Traditional DTT suffers from limitations of inconsistencies on account of human error, disruptions due to in-session data collection by trainers, and difficulties of producing physical within-stimulus prompts. Current software solutions e...