Your baseline observations

    Baseline observations are important for three reasons:

    1. Our unassisted memory of our life is poor.

    2. You can observe the context in which the behavior occurs and identify those situational factors that must be changed to intervene.

    3. You can identify whether change has occurred/is occurring. Is your project effective? This is sometimes difficult when we're very close to a project.

    As a result, take observations of your behavior for at least the next week and a half. When does your "problem" occur? How often? With what antecedents and what consequences? Several hints:

    • Choose a behavior that occurs relatively frequently. If the behavior that you want to track only occurs twice in a semester, enlarge the picture and look at related issues (e.g., other kinds of poor coping or other measures of stress).

    • Choose a behavior that you will be willing to talk about with your group (and the class). Thumbsucking or urinary control may be important issues to look at, but if you can't talk about it, you'll run into problems with this class.

    • Choose several behaviors to monitor. Everything will not change at the same rate.

      • Observe those you'd like to decrease. If you're doing things that you'd like to see change, monitor them to see whether they are in fact becoming less frequent.

      • Observe those you'd like to increase. You don't just want to not do your problematic behavior, but also do something positive. How many urges to smoke did you avoid?

    • Choose ways to record that are as easy as possible. The more difficult your observations are, the more you'll omit and the earlier you'll stop taking them.

    • Make your observations as rapidly as possible. Take notes in your binder, on a card in your pocket, move a penny from one pocket to another. Just do it!

    • Keep making baseline observations until you have a clear pattern and you have passed any period of reactivity. But, remember that you will need to graph your change across the semester. Continue to monitor your behavior, but make it as easy as possible.

    Page by jms
    URL= http://psy1.clarion.edu/jms/btbaslinobs.html

    Last updated January 28, 1999

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