Conference Season for DBI: a Recap
Ran here! Earlier this month, Stephanie and I put on our professional clothes (read: clothes that have less dog drool and fur than our typical work outfits) and headed out to a behavior conference in central MA. We have been attending this conference for about a decade now, and this was the second year that we were presenting on behalf of The Dog Behavior Institute and the work that we do with dogs.
Stephanie and I both started to attend professional behavior conferences when we were still in graduate school, and it was exciting to see the incredible breadth of work that people do within the field of behavior analysis. While most people at this particular conference are experts or currently students in Behavior Analysis, the majority of them work in human behavior, and we were eager to contribute to the diversity of the conference by bringing in programming related to dog behavior. Plus - who doesn’t want to talk about dogs?
Poster Presentations
The first DBI event was the poster event on Thursday evening. At conferences that have a poster session, the typical setup involves rows of boards where people mount their posters and then stand next to them. Other conference attendees then walk around and, when they see a poster they are interested in or have questions about, they stop to read the poster or talk with the presenter. It’s fairly unstructured, though some presenters have prepared talks they give.
We presented two case studies: one about a dog who jumped and our use of a treatment analysis to identify the function; and the other about a dog who engaged in dog-directed reactivity and our use of a functional analysis - conducted entirely by the guardians! - to confirm why the reactivity was occurring. We had fantastic conversations with people who wanted to know why their dogs jumped (we don’t know! We’d need to do an assessment.), what the “fake dog” we used in the functional analysis looked like (Stephanie had Max the fake dog in her car and he was a big hit when she brought him in), and whether you can really use behavior analysis with dogs (absolutely).
Click on either of the poster images to see a PDF of the posters!
Workshop Presentation
On Friday morning, we presented a 3-hour workshop on behavior analysis and dogs. This workshop involved translating the behavior analytic principles that our audience was already very familiar with to a new species - dogs! All Board Certified Behavior Analysts (BCBAs) must adhere to an ethics code, and one part of the code says that “Behavior analysts practice only within their identified scope of competence… [and] engage in professional activities in new areas (e.g., populations, procedures) only after accessing and documenting appropriate study, training, supervised experience, consultation, and/or co-treatment from professionals competent in the new area.”
An image from one of the workshop activities.
It is important to note that, as a species entirely different from humans, dogs qualify as a “population.” Being an expert in behavior does not automatically qualify someone to work with another species. We talk about this more extensively in our blog post, You are not your dog’s behavior analyst. Our workshop was not sufficient to provide all the study necessary to qualify a behavior analyst to work with dogs, but it did introduce many of the things that someone might need to consider when working with dogs.
It was fantastic to connect with so many people who are excited about behavior and want to learn more about dog behavior! And of course, it was a joy to see so many of the people that we only tend to see at these annual conferences.
Our values applied to conferences
As you know, our values are an essential part of the work that we do at DBI, and we try to approach every aspect of our business through a lens of equity and inclusion. To that end, when we attend professional conferences (or any event, really!), we pay attention to the extent to which the conference seems to be diverse, equitable, and accessible. We were frustrated and disappointed to see, once again, a real lack of diversity in the invited speakers - the people who are paid to present (as opposed to those paying to attend and present). We had provided this feedback to the conference organizers last year, and we reached out to them again earlier this year with no response and clearly no change when it came to Invited Speakers.
The space where the conference was held had severe barriers to access. Someone who used a walker or wheelchair would find this space incredibly difficult to navigate. The poster sessions were crowded and loud such that someone who needed to use a chair while presenting would have serious challenges. The sound quality in the main hall was terrible, and someone hard of hearing would struggle with understanding what was being said. The conference did not provide any guidelines about presentations, and many of the slides had text that was too small to read, a difficult color, or a challenging font. There were no accessibility accommodations offered. The only bathrooms available were small men’s and women’s bathrooms - there was no all-gender or family bathroom.
Overall, we appreciated the opportunity to connect with so many people in the field of behavior analysis and to hear about what other people in the field are talking about and working on. We had a strong reception and interest in the application of behavior analysis to dog behavior. However, when it comes to our values, the benefits we received as attendees did not come close to outweighing the barriers we observed and encountered. We will not be attending this conference next year, though we will be watching to see what action organizers take to try to improve the conference and overall accessibility. We will also continue to ask questions and press the people in charge to make changes, while we continue to learn more about what we should be asking and how to leverage our own privilege.