Many clinical judgments affect treatment decisions in behavior therapy. For most patients psychiatric diagnosis is insufficient for behavioral treatment design because there are important between-patient differences in causal factors. Pretreatment behavioral assessment is necessary to insure the most effective treatment strategy. Behavioral treatment programs are often based on assessment-based judgments about patient behavior problems, goals, and causal variables. These judgments and the subsequent methods of assessment, however, are affected by the tenets of the respective behavioral assessment paradigm. Such tenets include the multimodal, conditional, and dynamic nature of behavior problems; the importance of behavior in the natural environment, reciprocal determinism; and multiple, dynamic, and between-person differences in causal factors. Behavioral, as opposed to nonbehavioral, assessment methods are often lower-level, less inferential, focus on situational factors, and emphasize observation and behavioral skills in the natural environment. The functional analysis is the integration of pretreatment assessment data on a patient. It identifies the important, controllable, causal relationships applicable to specified behaviors for an individual patient. The Functional Analytic Clinical Case Model is an efficient method of organizing and communicating about the functional analysis.
