Assessment and treatment of multiply maintained problem behavior dependent on the time of day.

Purpose: The current study evaluated treatments derived from two functional analyses (FA) for a 7-year-old student with autism.

Method: The FA assessment was conducted at different times of the day and each revealed different functions in the morning and the afternoon.

Results: The morning FA suggested that problem behavior was maintained by positive reinforcement in the form of attention, whereas the afternoon FA showed that problem behavior was maintained by both positive reinforcement in the form of attention and negative reinforcement in the form of escape from task demands.

Discussion: results of this study suggested that differential reinforcement for appropriate behavior in a multiple schedule arrangement effectively reduced multiply maintained problem behavior across the school day.