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. 2021 Nov;45(6):988-1010.
doi: 10.1177/0145445520935392. Epub 2020 Jun 16.

Treatment Integrity Failures during Timeout from Play

Apral P Foreman  1 , Claire C St Peter  1 , Gabrielle A Mesches  1 , Nicole Robinson  1 , Lucie M Romano  1
Affiliations

Treatment Integrity Failures during Timeout from Play

Apral P Foreman et al. Behav Modif. 2021 Nov.

Abstract

Timeout is an effective behavior-reduction strategy with considerable generality. However, little is known about how timeout is implemented under natural conditions, or how errors in implementation impact effectiveness. During Experiment 1, we observed teachers implementing timeout during play to evaluate how frequently the teachers implemented timeout following target behavior (omission errors) and other behaviors (commission errors) for four children. Teachers rarely implemented timeout; thus, omission errors were frequent, but commission errors rarely occurred. During Experiment 2, we used a reversal design to compare timeout implemented with 0% omission integrity, 100% integrity, and the level of omission integrity observed to occur during Experiment 1 for two of the participants. Timeout implemented with reduced-integrity decreased problem behavior relative to baseline, suggesting that infrequent teacher implementation of timeout may have been sufficient to reduce problem behavior.

Keywords: negative punishment; omission errors; school; timeout; treatment integrity.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Percentage of omission and commission integrity across students in Experiment 1. The asterisk for Ian indicates that no challenging behavior was observed, so omission integrity could not be calculated.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Rates of targeted challenging behavior during time-in for Experiment 2. Each row shows data for one of the participants, with session-by-session data on the left and mean response rates on the right. The first phase (labeled EXP 1) shows rates during naturalistic teacher implementation of timeout. The dotted phase-change line in Willis’ graph shows the point at which he changed classrooms.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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