Date of Award

12-2023

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Behavioral Analysis

First Advisor

Catherine Nicholson, Ph.D., BCBA-D

Second Advisor

Jessica L. Wildman, Ph.D.

Third Advisor

Kaitlynn M. Gokey, Ph.D., BCBA-D

Fourth Advisor

Jonathan K. Fernand, Ph.D., BCBA-D

Abstract

Microaggressions are verbal behavior and environmental arrangements that communicate bias towards individuals of marginalized social groups (Sue, 2010). The LGBTQ+ community experiences high rates of interpersonal microaggressions, which have been associated with financial loss, community rejection, and mental health problems (Nadal et al., 2016). Sue et al., (2019) proposed the term “microintervention” to refer to behavioral strategies that function to reduce the harmful effects or the future frequency of microaggressions (Sue et al., 2019). Traditional inclusivity trainings have generally been developed outside of behavior analysis and focus on solely teaching skills to bystanders rather than training targets of discrimination actionable strategies as a means of empowerment and self-defense (Sue et al., 2019). The teaching interaction procedure (TIP) is an effective training method for teaching complex social skills to a variety of populations (Ferguson et al., 2021; Green et al, 2020; Leaf et al., 2012, 2015). The TIP involves the following steps: describing skill components, providing a rationale, breaking the skill into smaller steps, modeling correct and incorrect demonstrations, rehearsing the skill with the learner, and providing feedback on learner performance (Leaf et al., 2015). The TIP was evaluated using a nonconcurrent multiple baseline design to determine the effects on microintervention implementation by six LGBTQ+ adults. The TIP produced 100% occurrence of the trained microintervention steps post-training, across all six participants, and maintained one week after training. Additionally, all six participants emitted 100% of the microintervention steps under generalization conditions with novel microaggressions presented naturalistically by a novel person.

Available for download on Monday, December 16, 2024

Share

COinS