Behavioral Intervention Techniques

Behavioral intervention is when you actively try to change someone's behavior. Behavioral intervention techniques all rely on an underlying theme: creating consequences that encourage positive behavior. The two major angles you can approach this from are either to encourage positive behavior or discourage negative behavior, although there are a number of ways to do this.

Event Setting

• One way to intervene with behavior is to change the way a situation is set up. If, for example, a child consistently takes an hour or more to eat his dinner because he's getting so distracted by the television, you can just turn the television off. By changing the setting of the event, you can intervene with behavior by changing the environment.

Negative Consequences

• Negative consequences are a way to deal with behavior because they encourage the target of the intervention to associate the behavior with a negative consequence. An example of this is if a child consistently throws his food on the table during dinner. If you punish him every time by making him sit on the steps for a few minutes, he will start to change his behavior as he associates it with the unpleasant, boring time out.

Positive Consequences

• Behavior can be intervened with by setting positive consequences. If, for example, a child consistently throws his food on the ground you can make a star chart, where he gets one star for every meal he goes through without throwing anything on the ground. Once he gets a certain amount of stars, he can have a reward. This encourages behavioral change by giving the child an incentive to behave correctly rather than a disincentive for negative behavior.

Antecedents

• Antecedents are the things that happen immediately before a behavior. If you can change the antecedent, you can intervene and change the behavior. So, with the child who throws his food, examine what happens before dinner. Is dinner right after he woke up from his nap? If this is the case, then maybe you need to wake him up a little earlier so that he isn't cranky. By finding and addressing the things that cause negative behaviors, you can intervene with and change the negative behavior.