Functional Behavior Assessment (FBA) and behavior interventions have been effective in the management of challenging behavior among children with developmental disabilities including autism spectrum disorders. Research suggests the need for valid measurement instruments for verifying, calibrating and scoring competence in FBA and behavior…

The "School Refusal Assessment Scale" (SRAS) was developed to identify four factors that might maintain a youth's school attendance problem (SAP), and thus be targeted for treatment. There is still limited support for the four-factor model inherent to the SRAS and its revision (SRAS-R). Recent studies indicate problems with the wording…

Challenging behaviors and poor student performance are often attributed to many of society's ills. As a result of the presence of such factors in some students' lives, changing these students' behavior in the classroom is seen as futile unless one can change their nonschool environment. To facilitate the reader's capability to develop intervention…

Due to the relative inability of individuals with intellectual disabilities (ID) to provide an accurate and reliable self-report, assessment in this population is more difficult than with individuals in the general population. As such, assessment procedures must be adjusted to compensate for the relative lack of information that the individual can…

This study examined certain psychometric properties of the questions about behavioral function (QABF) scale. The QABF was completed on 118 problem behaviours presented by 40 young people with severe intellectual disabilities, and measures of inter-rater reliability, internal consistency, and construct validity were calculated overall and for…

Simulations were conducted to investigate factors that influence the Mantel, generalized Mantel-Haenszel (GMH), and logistic discriminant function analysis (LDFA) methods in assessing differential item functioning (DIF) for polytomous items. The results show that the magnitude of DIF contamination in the matching score, as measured by the average…