Pervasive Undisclosed Conflicts of Interest in Applied Behavior Analysis Autism Literature

Objective: Conflicts of interest (COIs) can introduce bias into the research process, and allow researchers to demonstrate positive effects for interventions that are not actually effective. However, there are no studies to date that examine the prevalence of COIs in applied behavior analysis (ABA) autism research. Because ABA services are routinely provided to autistic children as a means to address difficulties associated with autism, this is an important area of investigation. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the extent to which ABA autism interventions published in journals devoted to ABA have clinical/training consultancy COIs.Method: We tallied author COIs in articles published over a one-year period that tested, commented on, or reviewed ABA autism intervention strategies, extracted from eight journals devoted to publishing behavioral research. We focused on COIs related to researcher employment as an ABA clinical provider or a training consultant to ABA clinical providers. Results: We found that 84% of studies had at least one author with this type of COI, but they were only disclosed as COIs in 2% of studies. Additionally, 87% of studies with statements claiming the authors did not have COIs, were authored by researchers found to have clinical/training consultancy COIs. Conclusions: Pervasive, undisclosed COIs likely lead to researcher bias, and could at least partially account for persistent poor quality research in this area. Practitioners should be aware of the prevalence of undisclosed COIs in this literature, and take this into account when providing or recommending ABA services.