Article Club: Cultural Awareness for Behavior Analysts

Cultural Awareness, Defined in Behavior Terms

Pauli opened the hour with a blunt question. Are your current plans truly in line with what your clients value? Not one analyst in the room said 100 percent, and most landed between 60 and 80. One said the work of lining up is never done. Her own needs shift over time, so a client's needs will shift too.

Then came the definition, and it is a behavioral one. Cultural awareness means naming the contingencies (links between acts and results) that shape a person's behavior. It is a tact (a label for what you see), not a mood. You look at what works as reinforcement (what makes a behavior grow) in that home. You also look at what works as punishment (what makes a behavior drop). You do that for the client and for yourself.

Culture is not a backdrop. It sets the rules for what pays off in a given house. Skip it and you can read a behavior wrong from the first day. Pauli put culture in all three phases of the work. That means the assessment, the plan you write, and the way you deliver it.

It directly shapes reinforcement, punishment, and behavior.

From the talk — Pauli Catanese

Four Ways Culture Breaks a Technically Correct Plan

Pauli asked the group a second question. Have you seen a plan that was built right and still did not work? All the time, they said, because plans are generic and clients are not. One analyst added that you have to match the plan to where a child is ready. Two four year olds can be miles apart. One may do fine with a token economy (swapping earned tokens for prizes). The other may not grasp it at all.

The article names four common break points. You misread the function (the reason behavior keeps going) because of a culture gap. You pick reinforcers the family does not value. You ignore what the client and the caregiver truly care about. You get low treatment fidelity (how well a plan runs) from poor cultural fit.

On that last one the group was direct. A parent may nod and agree in the meeting. Then the data show the plan was never run at home. That is not laziness: the goal was not their priority, or it cut against what they value. The skill never generalizes (shows up in new places) because no one at home is choosing it.

If we don't have culture involved, you could create an intervention that won't work, or it could have adverse effects.

From the talk — Pauli Catanese

Start With Your Own Learning History, Not the Family's

Half of this skill points inward. Name your own bias and your own assumptions. Then go back through your learning history and ask what worked on you. What was a reward in your house growing up, and what was a punisher? That history is why some parts of this job feel easy and others feel odd.

One analyst gave a clean example. She grew up in a family that does not do much physical touch. Some of her clients find touch deeply rewarding. It takes her longer than her coworkers to get there, and she knows it, so she pushes herself on purpose. Another analyst asks her staff a direct question before they step into a faith setting that is not their own. Are you comfortable with this? She asks because years ago nobody asked her.

Group supervision does the same job from the outside. So do check-ins with your own trainees, who are with the client far more hours than you are. Their buy-in is data too, but keep the method honest. Family input is an indirect assessment (facts you gather by asking). It steers you, but it does not replace the numbers.

We need to examine what is reinforcing and what is punishing within the cultural context, both for our clients and ourselves.

From the talk — Pauli Catanese

How to Run a Cultural Assessment With the Family

Start with the basics and write them down. What language does the home speak first, and is English first or second? What does the family structure look like, and what counts as normal there? You cannot judge a behavior as odd until you know what odd means in that house.

Then map the rewards. What does the family enjoy, and what do they find harsh or rude? Bring the family and other key adults into the plan while you are still writing it. People run plans they helped build. Ask about style, too, because some families tease and joke all day. Formal, academic talk can land as cold or even rude with them.

Pauli drew the flow as three steps. Get input from the caregivers and the client first. Then run your functional analysis (a test of behavior's cause) and see what happens before and after. Then take your findings back to the family. Do they agree with what you saw, and is this a priority for them right now?

One more filter is age. A 15 year old who curses may just be a 15 year old. Ask how often it happens, where it happens, and whether the family cares. Typical development and culture both sit in that answer. A child may also face one set of rules at school and another at home.

Language Belongs on the Data Sheet

The sharpest story of the hour was about a scoring error. A young learner, barely a year into speaking, kept getting marked wrong on a tacting program (naming what you see). The problem items were school supplies: pencil, scissors, crayon, paper. The team logged wrong, wrong, wrong, and he was not wrong at all. He was answering in Spanish, and nobody on the team knew the word. An analyst caught it in the home, with the parent in the room.

The fix was small and it worked. Every target in that program got written in both languages on the sheet. Now any staff member could tell a right answer from an error, even one they could not say well. Translated materials do the same job for parent handouts. The group also liked logging a short list of home-language words in the session notes. That way the next person is not guessing.

Jargon is the other language problem. Drop the analytic words with parents, because most families hear negative reinforcement and think punishment. Match your words to how the family reads and talks. And ask which language you are meant to be teaching, because that is the family's call.

Use translated materials when needed.

From the talk — Pauli Catanese

When the Family's Priority Is Not Your Priority

Pauli asked who had sat with a family that simply disagreed with the clinical read. Hands went up. One analyst had urged a safe chew tool for a client who mouths objects and clothing. The parent refused every time, because of how it looks to other people. That value held steady for years. It left the analyst with no replacement option and a behavior that is hard to treat on its own.

Another analyst works with a family that ranks OT goals (aims from occupational therapy work) above the ABA goals. They want their child pulled from class for 20 extra minutes of fine motor work each day. She held the line in a fair place. We can overlap goals and we will, but we are not a second OT. She built a whole binder of ABA targets, and the parent still calls it the fine motor binder. She let the name go and kept the content.

Then there is the hardest version. Parents may want goals their child is nowhere near yet. Some are still working through grief about the diagnosis, which can take years. Denial and anger make shared goals hard to reach. The group's answer was not to cave and not to lecture. Stay kind, give your professional read, show the data, and keep pairing (building trust before demands). Many parents grow open to it later, once the bond is real.

Build Culture Into Supervision and the Org Chart

The article pushes this past the single case. One idea the group loved: name a cultural competency lead (one point person on culture) inside the company. That person helps on cases that sit far outside a clinician's own experience. You tend to be blind to your own gaps until somebody points at them.

In supervision, teach it head on. Show trainees how to talk with a family whose norms differ from theirs, and how to spot their own assumptions. Make it a running thread, not a module you finish once. At the org level, measure social validity (does the plan matter here) and cultural fit next to the clinical goals.

The group was honest about the gaps. The article noted something about the BACB task list (the board's list of skills). Cultural awareness was not spelled out in it at the time. Pauli flagged that the current edition does include items on personal bias and on diversity. She also called them broad statements. Formal training is still thin, so most people learn this from mentors and on the job. One analyst said the quiet part out loud. Once this content got folded into ethics, it risks becoming a checkbox instead of a practice.

The Other Failure Mode: Treating a Culture as a Rule Book

Learning about a culture is not the same as learning a script. Two families from the same culture will differ. There are no universal rules, and the range inside one group is wide. So ask instead of assume. If you do not know, say so. Tell the family you are not familiar with their culture. Say you would like to learn, and that you are asking so you can help them better.

Small moments put this to the test. A family offers you tea and looks hurt when you say no. The ethics code now allows gifts of small value, so the question has shifted. It is no longer whether you may accept. It is whether a refusal costs you the bond the whole plan rests on. Hugs, eye contact, praise, sleeping arrangements, and faith practice all work this way. Each one is a reward in one home and a punisher in another.

One guardrail stays fixed. Adapting is not the same as dropping the science. Keep the data and keep the method that has evidence behind it. Change the fit around them. Culture shapes the goals you pick and the way you deliver them. It does not excuse a plan that cannot show results.

But if we miss the first step, which is culture, everything along the way, it's going to be off.

From the talk — Pauli Catanese