Cultural Responsiveness in Applied Behavior Analysis: Inside JABA Series 12

The Behavioral Observations Podcast with Matt Cicoria

According to the Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts, Code Element 1.07 states:

"Behavior analysts actively engage in professional development activities to acquire knowledge and skills related to cultural responsiveness and diversity," and that "they evaluate their own biases and ability to address the needs of individuals with diverse needs/ backgrounds..."

In order to provide some direction in this effort, the guests for the 12th installment of the Inside JABA Series, Drs. Corina Jiminez-Gomez and Lauren Beaulieu have written a pair of well-researched and thoughtful papers that have been published in the spring and summer issues of JABA. These papers are:

• Cultural responsiveness in applied behavior analysis: Self-assessment (Beaulieu and Jimenez-Gomez, 2022), and,
• Cultural responsiveness in applied behavior analysis: Research and practice (Jimenez-Gomez and Beaulieu, 2022).

And they were kind enough to join Dr. Jeff Tiger and me to discuss their scholarship in this area. In particular, we talked about how Lauren and Corina became interested in this topic, some basic terms - as well as misconceptions - in this area, the importance of self-assessment, what it's like to venture into unfamiliar literatures, the role of culturally responsive functional assessment practices, "western science" as a culture, mistakes we sometimes make as practitioners, social validity, and much more.

This episode will be available for 1.5 Credits (Ethics) of BACB Continuing Education, and you can find out how to access this it here. Also, if you want to support the mission of JABA, please consider subscribing. As we mention in the episode, each JABA issue is about the size of a small textbook, and to my way of thinking, it represents an incredible value. If you have limited space on your bookshelf, you can purchase an online-access subscription too.

As noted above, these papers are extremely well-researched, and Lauren and Corina mentioned tons of work in the literature during the podcast. I've done my best to capture as many of those references as possible below. But for more information, I recommend simply going to the reference sections of the papers themselves, as they represent a treasure-trove of additional reading for those who are interested.

• Editor's Note: The Power of Big Ideas (LeBlanc, 2020)
• Multicultural alliance of behavior analysis standards for cultural competence in behavior analysis (Fong and Tanaka, 2013)
• Cultural Humility in the Practice of Applied Behavior Analysis (Wright, 2019)
• A Race Is a Nice Thing to Have: A Guide to Being a White Person or Understanding the White Persons in Your Life 3rd ed. Edition (Helms, 2019)
• Cultural Humility vs Cultural Competence (Tervalon and Murray-Garcia, 1998)
• Racial-cultural competence: Awareness, knowledge, and skills (Sue & Torino, 2005)
• Using Behavior Analysis to Examine the Outcomes of Unproven Therapies: An Evaluation of Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy for Children with Autism (Lerman et al., 2008)
• An experimental analysis of gender-biased verbal behavior and self-editing using an online chat analog (Oda et al., 2022)
• Reporting Demographic Variables in JOBM and JAP: A Comparison and Call to Action (Natasi, Crowe, and Gravina, 2022)
• On the Standardization of the Functional Analysis (Jessel et al., 2020)
• Humble Behaviorism Redux (Kirby et al., 2022)
• Dr. Melanie Domenech Rodriguez Google Scholar Page
• Assessment of social validity trends in the journal of applied behavior analysis (Ferguson et al., 2019)