Clean It Up: Motivating a 13-Year-Old Boy to Pick up His Room

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to reduce the messiness in a 13-year-old boy's room. Previous research indicated that contingent access to an activity reinforcer such as computer time might well provide the motivation to do what the participant had steadfastly refused to do in the past. The data show that relative to baseline there was a substantial decrease in the number of objects out-of-place once the contingency was in effect, although limitations in the design preclude absolute confidence that the intervention produced the reductions observed.

KEYWORDS:

• activity reinforcers
• adolescent
• behavioral contingency
• computer time
• messy bedroom

This study was conducted as an optional component of a course taught by the second author.

We thank Corey for his cooperation and interest in this project, and his father for his role as the reliability observer.