Diverse Interests in ABA: Session 153 with Nicole Rodriguez

In Session 153, , which I'll get to in just a minute. But to set the context for our conversation, I'd like to start by noticing that I often see the quote by Skinner, "When you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it," posted on social media quite frequently. In fact, when I plugged that quote into Google, it returned almost 9 million results!

Now, I could be wrong about this, but this notion of following one's interests would seem to fly in the face of developing a successful research career. That is, it may be more productive from a publishing point of view to go an inch-wide and mile-deep into a particular topic, and that academic contingencies perhaps nudge researchers away from investigating a wider range of phenomena.

What does all this have to do with this interview? Well, it seems that Nicole had done quite well in bucking this tendency, and that she has been quite successful doing research across a wide area of clinical topics. And in this conversation, we cover many of these research and practice interests, including supporting individuals with restricted and repetitive problem behaviors, the effects of physical reactions to aggressive behavior, what she's going to be talking about at the 2021 Verbal Behavior Conference, her outreach to Spanish speaking clients and families, and what it's like to pursue so many different research ideas.

She closes out the show with some fantastic advice that is not only applicable to newly minted BCBA's, but practitioners of all experience levels. I don't want to spoil it here in the intro, so you'll want to make sure to listen all the way through. Long story short, this was a fun conversation, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

In this episode, we discussed the following:

• Athens and Vollmer (2010).
• Hood, Rodriguez, Luczynski, and Fisher (2019).
• Fisher et al. (1996).
• Howard and Rice (1988).
• Dr. Solandy Forte on ABA Inside Track.
• The 2021 VBC. If you decide to attend, use code Podcast10 to save at checkout!

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