Applied Behavior Analysis Commons^™

Teaching Safe Dog-Greeting Skills With Parents And Children, Ashley Torres

Thesis Projects

Dog-bites pose a significant problem for children’s and dogs' abilities to live an enhanced life. The majority of dog-bite incidents are to children between the ages of 5 and 9 years old and often dogs are euthanized for the crime (Wilson, Dwyer, & Bennett, 2003). There is limited research on a behavior analytic dog-bite prevention intervention that is both effective and generalizable to the natural environment. Yankelevitz et al. (2019) examined a six-step dog-greeting protocol to teach children how to greet unfamiliar dogs appropriately, but following acquisition the dog-greeting skills generalized poorly to the natural environment. The purpose of the …