Behavior Modification in Applied Settings

Rating:
Summary: This book is a classic
Review: Kazdin's treatment of Behavior Modification in Applied Settings is comprehensive and lucid. It is extremly helpful for teaching behavior therapy to graduate students in clincal and school psychology. I strongly recommend this book to anyone involved in the process of promoting therapeutic change or teaching therapists to be effective agents for change.

Rating:
Summary: This book is a classic
Review: Kazdin's treatment of Behavior Modification in Applied Settings is comprehensive and lucid. It is extremly helpful for teaching behavior therapy to graduate students in clincal and school psychology. I strongly recommend this book to anyone involved in the process of promoting therapeutic change or teaching therapists to be effective agents for change.

Rating:
Summary: Good as a Textbook but not for the Casual Reader
Review: This was our textbook for the Psychology of Behavior Modification. While I feel it was invaluable for the classroom setting, there are better books out there to explain what exactly B-Mod is to the layman.

Kazdin uses the state-of-the-art B-mod lingo. The only thing he never made clear enough was his comparisons of positive/negative reinforcement and positive/negative punishment. This section had to be clarified by our instructor, who himself said that Kazdin confused him, and our instructor is a behaviorist.

The text contains many chart and graph illustrations that help you to understand the progress of the interventions explained in the text. However, I felt that there were too few intervention examples in the book, and the actual nuts-and-bolts "how-to" of a behavioral intervention were never given. Our instructor had to break that down for us.

All in all, it's the best of a sad lot of B-mod texts out there, but if you aren't a psychologist or a psych student, you'll find this one a tough read.

Rating:
Summary: Good as a Textbook but not for the Casual Reader
Review: This was our textbook for the Psychology of Behavior Modification. While I feel it was invaluable for the classroom setting, there are better books out there to explain what exactly B-Mod is to the layman.

Kazdin uses the state-of-the-art B-mod lingo. The only thing he never made clear enough was his comparisons of positive/negative reinforcement and positive/negative punishment. This section had to be clarified by our instructor, who himself said that Kazdin confused him, and our instructor is a behaviorist.

The text contains many chart and graph illustrations that help you to understand the progress of the interventions explained in the text. However, I felt that there were too few intervention examples in the book, and the actual nuts-and-bolts "how-to" of a behavioral intervention were never given. Our instructor had to break that down for us.

All in all, it's the best of a sad lot of B-mod texts out there, but if you aren't a psychologist or a psych student, you'll find this one a tough read.