Behavioral Skills Training for Active Shooter Scenarios Among Human Service Staff

ABSTRACT

Mass shootings have become increasingly prevalent in schools and healthcare settings. Unfortunately, little information is available on training for active shooter scenarios in which a staff member is also responsible for a client. This deficit is concerning, given that previous research has found that 75% of individuals freeze during emergencies. Behavioral skills training has been shown to be an effective way to teach a variety of safety-related skills. This study used a concurrent multiple-baseline-across-participants design to evaluate the effects of behavioral skills training on active shooter scenario safety-related skills of three Registered Behavior Technicians®. The experimenters trained the participants on how to respond under various conditions and when they should run, hide, or fight. All three participants mastered the safety-related behaviors in the three conditions (run, hide, fight), demonstrated generalization to more realistic antecedent stimuli, and maintained the skills over time.

KEYWORDS:

• Active shooting
• behavioral skills training
• safety
• training

Acknowledgments

This research was conducted by the first author, under the supervision of the second author, at Florida Institute of Technology in partial fulfillment of the thesis requirements for the Master of Science degree in Applied Behavior Analysis and Organizational Behavior Management. We would like to thank Ryan Walz, Shana Fentress, and Joshua Addington for their help running sessions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Availability of data and material

All data are included in this manuscript in graphic form. Raw data are available from the first author upon reasonable request.

Compliance with ethical standards

All procedures performed in this research were approved by the Institutional Review Board at Florida Institute of Technology (IRB #19–089) and were in accordance with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Consent to participate

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Consent to publish

The authors affirm that all the human research participants provided informed consent for publication of their data.