Applied Behavioral Analysis, or ABA for short, is a type of medical therapy that’s been making waves as of late. Many decades of research form the foundation of the ABA industry, allowing healthcare professionals a means of analyzing the behavior that patients on the autistic scale exhibit. Using the analysis of these behaviors, health care providers are able to better tailor programs and initiatives to fit their patient’s needs. ABA therapists are playing a vital role in today’s healthcare climate and they have a lot to be proud of.
Studies have shown that around half (50%) of those individuals with autism who receive ABA therapy before the age of four show significant improvements in IQ, verbal skills, and social functioning over those who did not receive a similar treatment.
There are six main cited benefits of ABA treatment. They are as follows:
- Increasing behavior through positive reinforcement of on-task behavior or social interactions. This associates good behavior with productivity and well-behavedness.
- Teaching new skills to patients by instructing and reinforcing procedures that teach functional life skills, social skills, communicative skills, and other skills that a person could utilize to increase the quality of their lives.
- Maintaining positive behaviors by teaching self control and instilling self-monitoring procedures in patients to generalize job-related social skills.
- To reduce interfering behaviors such as injury or stereotypy, which is the act of ceaseless repetition amongst animals or humans.
- To restrict, eliminate, or slow down (at the very least) any conditions where interfering behaviors are known to occur.
- Transfer behavior from one situation or response to another one. This helps ensure that the positive behaviors are being experienced and encouraged universally, and not just in one environment.
For this amount of focus and for the amount of results ABA therapists are able to routinely produce, ABA practices have been endorsed by the Surgeon General, the National Institute of Health (known as NIH throughout the industry), and the Association for Science in Autism Research.
