Bulk discounts available: Order 4-10 guides and get 15% off! Order 11+ guides and get 20% off!
Copyright notice: The Motivation Assessment Scale and The Motivation Assessment Scale (MAS) Administration Guide copyright © 1992 by Monaco & Associates Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction of these works in any form, including digital and electronic transmission, is a violation of United States copyright law and international agreements and is prohibited. If you wish to excerpt any portion of the material for your publication, contact us here.
Description
About the Motivation Assessment Scale (from the MAS Administration Guide)
The Functional Approach
"Despite all of our best efforts, a large number of people who have severe disabilities continue to display serious and disruptive behavior problems...
"All of us would prefer to use only positive treatments for these behavior problems... [M]ost people involved in this field today recommend that a functional analysis be carried out before any treatment. The idea behind the functional analysis is to see why the person is misbehaving...A teacher might give a student difficult class work for 5 minutes, easy work for 5 minutes, then difficult work for 5 minutes to see if the student was more disruptive during different types of tasks. Similarly, parents or evening staff could alternate nights of giving or withholding nighttime snacks to see if these treats are having an effect on problems around bedtime..."
Practical Problems
"Several problems come up when trying to discover why someone is misbehaving using a functional analysis...For example, as we just described, a teacher could change the difficulty of tasks to see if this changes a student’s behavior problem. But what if the student then hits another student when he is upset? What if he hurts himself? Is the information from such an assessment worth the risk of injury?
"Another problem...is knowing where to look...Unfortunately, in the past, little help has been available to assist in selecting among the infinite number of things that might be causing certain behavior problems."
The MAS
"We have developed the Motivation Assessment Scale (MAS) as an additional way to find out why people’s problem behaviors persist by assessing the influence of social attention, tangibles, escape, and sensory consequences on problem behavior. The MAS is a sixteen item questionnaire that assesses the functions or motivations of behavior problems. The sixteen items are organized into four categories of reinforcement (attention, tangible, escape, and sensory) described in the previous section. The MAS asks questions about the likelihood of a behavior problem occurring in a variety of situations (e.g., when presented with difficult tasks).
"In addition, using this scale does not involve making behavior problems worse, a feature that has obvious advantages. It is hoped that through the use of the MAS, people with severe behavior problems will have greater access to positive interventions."
Research on the MAS
"One question that is often asked when discussing the Motivation Assessment Scale has to do with its necessity. Would simply asking teachers, parents, or others if an individual’s problem behavior was maintained by attention, escape, tangibles, or sensory consequences yield the same information as a full administration of the scale? In order to answer this question, we asked the teachers in a previous study to rank the four classes of maintaining variables for their possible influence on the individuals’ self-injurious behaviors (Durand & Crimmins, 1988). We observed that these rankings did not correlate significantly with the teachers’ MAS scores. Therefore, although teachers could predict an individual’s self-injurious behavior through their answers on the Motivation Assessment Scale, their global ratings of controlling variables were not as accurate. Guessing why individuals may misbehave may be helpful in order to generate hypotheses, but it is always important to follow up your guesses with more formal assessments."
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
- Obstacles to Positive Intervention
- The MAS
- About Our Terminology
BACKGROUND
- Why Ask Why?
- How Big a Problem?
- Some Reasons Why
- Social Attention
- Tangibles
- Escape
- Sensory Feedback
- Multiple Motivations
- Other Influences
- Being Consistent
THE MOTIVATION ASSESSMENT SCALE
- Item Selection
- Individual Item Descriptions
- The Use Of Other Assessment Methods
ADMINISTRATION
- Using the MAS with Raters
- Using the MAS as an Interview Tool
- Completing the MAS
- Behavior Description
- Frequent Behaviors
- Infrequent Behaviors
- Setting Description
- Rating the Items
- Scoring Procedure
SCORE INTERPRETATION
- Close Scores/Ties
- Obstacles to Clear Interpretation
TREATMENTS AND INTERVENTIONS
- Setting Changes
- Teaching Alternative Behaviors
- Identifying Effective Reinforcers
- Trouble-Shooting
RESEARCH ON THE MAS
- Reliability
- Factor Structure
- Validity
- Treatment Design
- The MAS Compared to Unstructured Verbal Report
- Related Research
REFERENCES
APPENDIX: MOTIVATION ASSESSMENT SCALE
INDEX