Psychology/Behavior/Antecedents, behaviour, consequences

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Behavior

Antecedents, behaviour, consequences

The most informative form in observational work, and the most abused. Three rules keep it honest; without them it becomes a narrative device for a conclusion you had already reached.

The three rules

  1. Record in real time.Not from memory at the end of the session, and not at the end of the day. Reconstructed ABC records drift towards whatever explanation you already favour, and they do it without your noticing.
  2. Description only, in all three columns.The antecedent column is not for “he was already in a bad mood”. It is for what happened, observably, immediately before.
  3. Interpretation goes in a fourth column, initialled.Your reading is valuable. It is not evidence. Keeping it in its own column with your initials on it is what allows somebody else to weigh it.

What each column is for

Column What belongs there What does not
Antecedent What happened immediately before — who said or did what, what changed in the environment, what the person had just been asked to do. Mood, motive, history, or “nothing happened” (something always happened).
Behaviour Exactly what was done or said, in observable terms, with duration or count. Labels, categories, or clinical vocabulary.
Consequence What happened next, and who did it — including what adults did. What you think the person was trying to achieve.
My reading Your interpretation, hypothesis or hunch — initialled and dated. Anything you want the reader to accept as fact.

The most common failure

The antecedent column reads “was asked to start work” for every entry, because that is what the observer was looking for. Meanwhile the setting fields, if they had been completed first, would have shown that eight of eleven instances occurred within ten minutes of an unannounced change of activity.

This is why the environment map and the preceding-conditions checklist exist. ABC records alone tend to confirm whatever the observer already suspected.

What ABC records can and cannot establish

Can Cannot
That certain conditions co-occurred with the behaviour, and how often. That those conditions caused the behaviour.
That a particular adult response followed the behaviour repeatedly. That the person was seeking that response.
That the pattern differs between two settings. That the person has a trait, condition or disorder.
That something changed after an intervention began. That the intervention worked, unless you recorded a genuine baseline first.

Strengthening a weak ABC set

  • Add the preceding-conditions checklist — tick what was true in the sixty minutes before each instance. Over ten instances the ticks concentrate, and that concentration is usually the most useful finding available.
  • Add the scatter grid — time of day against day of week. Dense rows and columns almost always point at a schedule rather than a person.
  • Add a second setting. If the pattern appears in only one, it belongs to the setting as much as to the person.
  • Add a second observer for at least a fifth of sessions.

ABC narrative form

The four-column ABC record, the preceding-conditions checklist and the scatter grid are all included in the toolkit.

View the resource

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