Analyzing Lea's Definition Of Skin Picking

Lea is a 23 year old from a middle class family. She is a high school graduate and currently working at a neighborhood grocery store as a Cashier. She has normal communication skills but does not communicate a lot with people, especially strangers. Lea spends most of her time in her room. Lea likes watching television shows such as “The Big Bang Theory, or The Real O’Neals” and she likes to be on her phone and listening to music. Lea likes to be around her friend, Melissa and she seems to enjoy spending time with Melissa and likes to help other people. However, lately Melissa has been distancing herself from Lea because of Lea’s skin picking when they are in public.
Over the past two weeks Lea has been engaging in more skin picking. During …show more content…
K-Love reported that Lea’s skin picking involved Lea crossing both of her hands and digging her fingers into her upper arms. During my direct assessment, I observed Lea for five days on different days, times and locations. After three days into my assessment, I changed the definition of skin picking to any instance or attempts Lea crosses both of her arms and digging fingers into his/her upper arms or scratching and/or pinching on any part of her body because the topography of the behavior was not as accurate as K. Love had described. I discussed it with K-Love and we decided to include scratching and/or pinching on any part of her body in the previous definition.
According to the report from the ABA data, Lea engaged in higher rates of skin picking during community outing. Therefore, baseline data showed the relationship between antecedent community outing and the problem behavior. As indicated by the ABC data, skin picking occurred 62% during community outing, 31% during social interaction and 7% during demand. This data on the consequences of the problem behavior confirmed that escape/avoidance was a function. I hypothesized that skin picking is maintained by