Incorporating Ethics Into Supervision
By: Matt Brodhead, Ph.D., BCBA-D
Engaging in ethical behavior can protect consumers, increase quality of care, and promote the field of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA). If you are providing supervision to an individual pursuing a credential offered by the Behavior Analyst Certification Board ®, there are 5 easy things you can do to incorporate ethics into your supervision practices.
Tip #1. Make Ethics a Recurring Agenda Item. During your weekly one-on-one meetings, ethics should always be a recurring agenda item.
The purpose of this is to encourage discussion about ethics. Often times, people shy away from ethics, perceiving it as difficult or pairing it with punishment. By encouraging an open-dialogue about ethics, supervisees may instead become more trusting and willing to discuss ethics with their supervisors.
Tip #2. Make Ethics Relevant. Weekly discussions about ethics can allow you, the supervisor, to focus on things that matter to you and your supervisee. You can focus on company policies (e.g., policies about receiving gifts from clients) or follow up on previous advice you provided to them on an ethical issue. Whatever it is, focus on ethical issues your supervisee has encountered, or is likely to encounter, in the setting and context in which they provide services.
Tip #3. Create and Pull from an Archive of Ethical Issues. Too often do supervisors rely on irrelevant case studies or unrealistic ethical scenarios to teach others about ethics. Instead, you should keep a running document of all of the ethical issues and dilemmas you or your employees have encountered at your organization. Then, you will have an ever-expanding resource of teaching materials to pull from during your supervision meetings.
An archive of ethical issues can be of extra benefit for new employees, because it allows a supervisor to teach them about what types of ethical issues they may encounter at your organization.
For example, if you work for an in-home ABA program, there are likely certain types of ethical issues (e.g., risks of developing multiple relationships) that likely repeat themselves again and again. With an archive to draw from, you can prevent new employees from making the wrong decisions when faced with those problems that others have been faced with in the past!
Tip #4. Measure Supervisee Success. A core value of ABA is in the ongoing measurement of behaviors that are the target of a behavior change program. Just as you would measure the effectiveness of your supervision of your supervisee’s ability to implement discrete trial instruction, you should also measure how well they are learning about ethics.
Work with your supervisee to operationally define target behaviors, and to develop ways to measure those behaviors over time. And if your supervisee’s ethics knowledge does not improve over time, revise your teaching strategies until those strategies are effective.
Tip #5. Engage in Your Own Professional Development. Just as your supervisee has a lot to learn from you, you also have a lot to learn from others in the field. Embark on a lifelong journey of continuing education in the area of ethics so you are equipped to bring that knowledge back to your own company. Your knowledge will not only help your supervisees grow more competent, but it will also help to protect the clients you serve and promote the brand of ABA.
Interested in learning more? Purchase A Workbook in Behavioral Systems analysis and Ethical Behavior and learn how to improve the ethical behavior of your employees.
The above information is based off of recommendations from the peer-reviewed article, Teaching and Maintaining Ethical Behavior in a Professional Organization by Matthew T. Brodhead and Thomas S. Higbee. The peer-reviewed article was published in 2012 in Behavior Analysis in Practice.