ABSTRACT
As social workers become more familiar with the principles and methods of the sociobehavioral approach, an increasing number will wish to apply these principles in practice. 1 Judging by the increasing amount of empirical re search that supports this approach, there would appear to be a substantial basis for such application. 2 However, practitioners frequently encounter difficulty in their early attempts to implement behavioral methods in work with clients. In some cases this appears to be due to the combining of be havioral with other methods, often producing an incongruent blend; in other instances, misapplication may follow from insufficient knowledge of the methods and principles themselves. A more pervasive difficulty, however, is that there is presently no set of procedural guidelines to aid the worker in approaching cases from a behavioral point of view and organizing his prac tice activities sequentially and systematically in accordance with that view. In addition, most practitioners who try to use behavioral methods were orig inally trained and have had most of their experience in non-behavioral methods. Also, there are often influences inimical to behavioral practice deriving from agencies and professional groups. For example, agency policy may not favor client-worker contacts in the natural environment that often are important in the behavioral approach; or supervisors may not permit their workers to use this approach.
