Abstract
Treatments for individuals with developmental disabilities regularly include assessments of individual choice and preference. These procedures assist in the development, design, and maintenance of effective, evidence-based practices. Despite widespread use, these assessments may or may not accurately identify reinforcers that will be effective in treatments. Procedures and analyses from the area of behavioral economics have been proposed to address this potential source of error, although these procedures are observed relatively infrequently in the current literature. The purpose of this study was to systematically review the elements of behavioral economics that have and have not been incorporated into assessments or treatments for individuals with disabilities. The PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) methodology was utilized (Prospero: #CRD42017069859) to systematically search the literature and the Scopus, PsycINFO, ScienceDirect, and SpringerLink databases were included. Studies were included if their procedures used behavioral economics and if those procedures were used with individuals with developmental disabilities. Twenty-two studies were identified and the results of this review indicated that only a limited range of behavioral economic procedures have been translated into assessments and treatments for individuals with developmental disabilities. This review discusses the degrees to which these procedures have been extended to this population and outlines additional research and replication to further aide in the translation of these procedures into applied practice.
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Notes
We make two notes with respect to the term behavioral economics. The first is that the present review focuses on the behavioral economics that is an outgrowth of the operant behavior framework, rather than the behavioral economics that has been recently popularized as an outgrowth of mainstream psychology (Ariely 2008; Camerer 1999; Kahneman et al. 1982; Thaler and Sunstein 2008). Second, we note that operant behavioral economics also subsumes frameworks of delay discounting and matching law, but here we focus on the aspects of behavioral economic demand.
Important to note is that these work output curves do not depict rate of responding as is typically seen in traditional behavior-analytic studies, as responses are not standardized over a fixed amount of time (e.g., per min). Rather, one can interpret the work output curve as the rate of responding over the entire session(s) associated with each individual price point.
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Gilroy, S.P., Kaplan, B.A. & Leader, G. A Systematic Review of Applied Behavioral Economics in Assessments and Treatments for Individuals with Developmental Disabilities. Rev J Autism Dev Disord 5, 247–259 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40489-018-0136-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40489-018-0136-6