Treatment of Severe Destructive Behavior: Functional Communication Training Versus Wait-List Control

Children with an intellectual disability often display severe destructive behavior (e.g., aggression, self-injury) that pose risks to themselves or others and represent barriers to community integration. Destructive behaviors are often treated with behavioral interventions derived from a functional analysis, which is used to identify the antecedents and consequences that occasion and reinforce the destructive behavior. One treatment is called functional communication training (FCT), which involves extinction of destructive behavior and reinforcement of an alternative communication response with the consequence that previously reinforced destructive behavior. Results from epidemiological studies and meta-analyses indicate that treatments based on functional analysis, like FCT, typically reduce destructive behavior by 90% or more and are more effective than other treatments. However, many if not all of these studies have used within-subject experimental designs to demonstrate control of the treatment effects. Replication of the effects of FCT is typically shown on a subject-by-subject basis with relatively small numbers of patients (e.g., one to four patients). No study has demonstrated the effectiveness of FCT for treatment of destructive behavior across a large group of children.

The goal of this study is to compare FCT (which is used clinically with the majority of the investigators' patients and is considered best practice for treating destructive behavior that occurs for social reasons [e.g., to access attention, preferred toys, or to escape from unpleasant activities]) to a waitlist control group across a large number of children with destructive behavior to evaluate the generality of FCT effectiveness. The investigators will evaluate rates of destructive behavior with each patient during a pretest baseline and again following FCT (approximately four months later) and/or the waitlist control duration (again, approximately four months later). All children assigned to the waitlist-control condition will be offered FCT services by the investigators' clinic at the end of the four-month waitlist period. These children will again be tested following four months of FCT (i.e., posttest). Therefore, children assigned to the FCT condition will be tested twice (one pretest and one posttest), and children assigned to the waitlist-control condition will be tested thrice (one pretest, a second pretest following a four-month waitlist period, and one posttest).