Applied Behavior Analysis and Occupational Safety: The Challenge of Response Maintenance

Methods of generalization (Stokes & Baer, 1977) are applied to investigate contingencies that produce long-term response maintenance in large-scale behavioral interventions for industrial safety. It is proposed that characteristics representing four methods originally outlined by Stokes and Baer (1977) have an additive effect on the duration and amount of response maintenance obtained. To evaluate the validity of this conceptualization, a sample of occupational safety research published in refereed journals between 1974 and 1996 is described and analyzed. Regardless of intervention technique, noteworthy consistencies among all studies successful at producing maintenance were the use of on-site workers to administer the program and general feedback in the context of multiple target behaviors; or a single-target behavior that was easy and convenient to emit. It is recommended that applied behavior analysts set out to program response maintenance at the expense of publishing fewer short-term demonstrations of functional control.