ABSTRACT
Behavior therapy has grown from its status as a revolutionary “upstart” in the late 1960s to the most common form of treatment used with children and adolescents (Powers & Rickard, 1992). In part, this has been prompted by the very nature of behavior therapy. Although often mistakenly perceived as a collection of techniques, the essence of behavior therapy is an experimental approach to human behavior (Goldfried & Davison, 1994). The use of operational knowledge is fundamental to understanding and altering behavior, whether overt or covert (e.g., thoughts and physical sensations). Behavior therapists operationalize abstractions such as depression or anxiety via concrete descriptions of behavior or physiological measurement. Therapeutic change involves the search for and manipulation of the strongest controlling variables, with the patient’s behavior assumed to be lawful. Each clinical case is thus essentially a mini-experiment. Data collection is central to developing and testing the therapist’s working hypothesis and judging the success of treatment, and the patient is often involved in recording his or her actions and in planning and evaluating therapeutic interventions. The behavioral approach to therapy is thus inherently compatible with evaluating the efficacy of therapy, and it is not surprising that most outcome research has focused on behavioral and cognitive-behavioral interventions. The documented efficacy of behavior therapy has obviously played a major role in its widespread acceptance.
