The Nature of Behavioral Assessment: Some Current Dimensions of Behavioral Assessment

The purpose of this paper is to describe some current dimensions of behavioral assessment. The goal of behavioral assessment is to identify meaningful response units and their controlling variables for the purposes of understanding and of altering behavior. Adequate behavioral assessment requires the reliable measurement of all the responses and the response types of major importance to the issue at hand, in ways which quantify their important dimensions, reveal their complexity and interrelationships, and identify the temporal, situational, organismic, and consequential variables of which they are a function. The quality of behavioral assessment is determined by it's contribution to our ability to make descriptions of behavioral relations with greater generality and conceptual clarity and by the increased ability to produce beneficial treatment outcomes.