The purpose of this dissertation was to use delay discounting to understand how teachers of students who engage in challenging behavior discount delays in behavioral treatment outcomes. Delay discounting is relevant to teacher decision-making because the length of time required to reduce challenging behavior through effective behavior interventions may deter teachers from adhering to recommended behavioral interventions. Further, discount rates may serve as an indicator of future treatment adherence (or non-adherence). The goal of the dissertation is to inform the behavioral consultation practices of behavior specialists working with teachers of students who engage in challenging behavior in order to improve the outcomes of students receiving behavioral support through the behavioral consultation model. Chapter 2 addressed limitations to a previous delay discounting (White et al., 2023). Using the monetary choice questionnaire (MCQ; Kirby et al., 1999), the researchers reduced the length of the delay discounting task, assessed monetary and treatment discounting, and recruited 317 participants to increase statistical power to run additional inferential statistics. In the study, the authors administered the MCQ to assess discounting of monetary rewards and a treatment choice questionnaire (TCQ) modeled from the MCQ to assess discount rates of treatment outcomes. Results of the study indicate that teachers discounted monetary rewards similar to discounting of treatment outcomes. A significant difference between location groups in the low discounting group indicated that respondents that teach in the southern region of the U.S. had higher discount rates compared to remaining U.S. regions. Additionally, the authors created a 10-step fraudulent response detection process to remove any fraudulent reposes from the data set. Chapter 3 extended the findings of Chapter 2 by determining if a specific variable – severity of behavior – impacted teachers’ rate of discounting. The authors administered two TCQs to assess behavior severity as a state influence. One TCQ evaluated discounting of treatment outcomes for hypothetical severe challenging behavior, and the other TCQ evaluated discounting of treatment outcomes for hypothetical mild challenging behavior. Further, the authors replicated and extended the fraudulent response detection process described in Chapter 2. Results of the study indicate that teachers did discount delays to both monetary outcomes and treatment outcomes, and teachers did have higher discount rates in the severe TCQ compared to the mild TCQ. Additionally, extending the fraudulent response detection process guarded against fraudulent responses, and the inclusion of attention check questions aided in identifying fraudulent responses. Chapter 4 presents readers with a delay discounting tutorial. The authors (1) described translational research, delay discounting, and teacher decision-making, (2) provided researchers with a step-by-step description on how to collect delay discounting data using survey research methodology and fraud protections, and (3) described areas for future research using delay discounting to examine teacher decision-making.
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