Health Science Essentials of Behavior Analysis

Course Description

Health Science Essentials of Behavior Analysis provides content for students interested in career opportunities in the field of behavior analysis or in learning about behavior analysis as an elective. It serves as a basic introduction to behavior analytic principles, definitions, characteristics, processes, and concepts, measurement, assessment, and behavior change procedures.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, HSC is the Health Sciences prefix. The University of West Florida publishes this at 3 semester hours through the College of Health. It is offered at approximately 3 Florida institutions.

⚠⚠⚠ The statewide inventory calls this number "Perspectives in Health." It is not. See the block below — this is an introduction to applied behaviour analysis, and it is the entry point of a sequence continuing into HSC4720.

Behaviour analysis is a genuinely distinct approach, and its central commitment is unusual: it treats behaviour itself as the subject matter rather than as evidence of something internal. The unit of analysis is the relationship between behaviour and its environmental consequences, measured directly and repeatedly on the individual rather than inferred from group averages.

⚠ That commitment is also the source of the field's controversies, which this guide addresses below rather than omitting.

⚠ The contact-hour figure is derived — the University of West Florida publishes none

UWF's catalog publishes a credit value in semester hours, the college and department, prerequisites where they exist, and a description. It does not publish contact hours or terms of offering for any course. Every contact-hour value in a UWF guide in this repository is derived. The figure here applies the standard lecture convention of 15 contact hours per credit, giving 45 hours for a 3-semester-hour course. ⚠ Note what UWF does NOT publish anywhere in the HSC prefix: no fee notices on this entry, no "permission is required" marking, and no co-requisite blocks — which distinguishes it sharply from UWF's clinical health prefixes. Confirm the offering pattern with the department.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Describe the philosophical assumptions of behaviour analysis.
• Distinguish behaviour analysis from other psychological approaches.
• Distinguish the experimental analysis of behaviour from applied behaviour analysis.
• Define behaviour in observable and measurable terms.
• Describe respondent and operant conditioning.
• Describe reinforcement, positive and negative, and its effects.
• Describe punishment and the constraints on its use.
• Describe extinction and extinction bursts.
• Describe schedules of reinforcement and their behavioural effects.
• Describe stimulus control, discrimination, and generalisation.
• Describe motivating operations.
• Describe shaping, chaining, and prompting procedures.
• Select and apply appropriate measurement systems for behaviour.
• Describe continuous and discontinuous measurement and their trade-offs.
• Assess inter-observer agreement and describe why it matters.
• Graph behavioural data and interpret it visually.
• Describe functional behaviour assessment and its purposes.
• Describe the common functions of behaviour.
• Describe function-based intervention selection.
• Apply the BACB ethics code to a described situation.
• Describe applications of behaviour analysis within health contexts.

Optional Outcomes

• Relate the material to a Florida county using local data.
• Describe how the topic maps onto NCHEC Areas of Responsibility.
• Evaluate a current research paper in the topic area.
• Describe emerging developments likely to affect practice.
• Apply the material to your own intended career route.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Philosophical assumptions
• Behaviour analysis and other approaches
• EAB and ABA distinguished
• Operational definition of behaviour
• Respondent and operant conditioning
• Reinforcement
• Punishment and its constraints
• Extinction
• Schedules of reinforcement
• Stimulus control, discrimination, generalisation
• Motivating operations
• Shaping, chaining, prompting
• Measurement systems
• Continuous and discontinuous measurement
• Inter-observer agreement
• Graphing and visual analysis
• Functional behaviour assessment
• Functions of behaviour
• Function-based intervention
• Ethics
• Applications in health

Optional Topics

• Florida county-level application
• NCHEC Areas of Responsibility mapping
• Current research
• Emerging developments
• Career application

Resources & Tools

• Cooper, Heron and Heward, Applied Behavior Analysis — the field's standard text, universally referred to as "the white book".
• BACB (bacb.com) — free; the ethics code, task list, and certification requirements. ⚠ Read the certification requirements early, since they determine which coursework counts.
• The Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis — many articles are freely available; it is unusually readable for a research journal because single-subject designs are shown graphically.
• Autistic self-advocacy writing on ABA — free and widely available; engage with it directly rather than through summaries.
• Florida CHARTS (flhealthcharts.gov) — free; county-level health data for every Florida county.
• NCHEC (nchec.org) — free; the CHES Areas of Responsibility and eligibility requirements.
• CDC (cdc.gov) — free; surveillance data and guidance.

Career Pathways

• Health education specialists — SOC 21-1091; the direct destination, and the role CHES certification exists for.
• Community health workers — SOC 21-1094.
• Florida county health departments and the Florida Department of Health — the largest public employer of this training in the state, and the route into outbreak response, chronic disease programmes, and community assessment.
• Hospital and health system community-benefit roles — AdventHealth, Orlando Health, BayCare, Baptist Health, and in UWF's own region Baptist Health Care and Ascension Sacred Heart in Pensacola. ⚠ Non-profit hospitals are federally required to conduct community health needs assessments, which is directly this skill set.
• Worksite wellness and employee health programmes — a substantial private-sector route, including Florida's large hospitality and tourism employers.
• Non-profit and community organisations — American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, and local coalitions.
• Health insurers and managed care — member health and disease management programmes.
• School health education — ⚠ teaching health in Florida K-12 schools requires state teacher certification, which a health science degree alone does not provide. Plan the education route deliberately if this is the goal.
• Graduate pathways — MPH, health administration, physician assistant, and clinical programmes; this prefix is a common pre-health undergraduate route.
• ⚠ An honest note on entry-level work. Health education roles frequently start as grant-funded positions with fixed terms, and continuation depends on the grant rather than on performance. That is normal in the field and worth knowing before the first job rather than after it.

Special Information

⚠⚠ The credential this degree points at: CHES

• The Certified Health Education Specialist (CHES) credential, awarded by NCHEC, is the standard professional certification for health education graduates — the health-education counterpart of NCLEX for nursing or ASCP certification for laboratory science.
• ⚠ Eligibility is based on coursework rather than on a specific degree title. A candidate must hold a bachelor's degree and show a required number of semester hours addressing NCHEC's Areas of Responsibility. Which courses count is determined by content, so keep syllabi and catalog descriptions — they are the evidence.
• The Areas of Responsibility map closely onto this prefix: assessment of needs and capacity, planning, implementation, evaluation and research, advocacy, communication, and leadership and management. Most HSC courses are addressing one of them deliberately.
• ⚠⚠ Check eligibility before your final year, not after graduating. If a required area is not covered by your plan, it is far easier to add a course than to remediate afterwards.
• MCHES is the advanced credential, requiring experience beyond the entry-level certification.
• ⚠ Public health has a parallel route: the CPH credential from the National Board of Public Health Examiners, generally aimed at those with public health degrees. Health education and public health are related and are not the same field — see the note on that distinction below.

⚠⚠ Health education and public health are related fields, not interchangeable ones

• This matters here because the statewide inventory and UWF name these courses differently in ways that cross the boundary — the queue title for HSC3032, for instance, is "Foundations of Public Health" while UWF publishes "Foundations in Health Education."
• Public health is the broader field, encompassing epidemiology, biostatistics, environmental health, policy and management, and health behaviour. Health education and promotion is one of its components, focused on behaviour change, programme planning, and community capacity.
• ⚠ The credentials differ — CHES for health education, CPH for public health — and the graduate routes differ too: an MPH is the standard public health qualification, while health education has its own master's pathways.
• ⚠⚠ Do not assume a course satisfies a requirement written against the other field's name. Carry a syllabus, and check with the receiving programme or the credentialing body rather than matching on a title.

⚠⚠⚠ The statewide title names a different subject — you are reading the UWF version

• The statewide SCNS inventory records this number as "Perspectives in Health." The University of West Florida publishes it as "Health Science Essentials of Behavior Analysis." A generic perspectives-on-health title against a specific introduction to applied behaviour analysis — these are not variant names for the same course.
• ⚠⚠ UWF appears to run an applied behaviour analysis track inside its HSC prefix that the statewide titles do not reveal. This course and HSC4720, which requires it, form a sequence — and the statewide inventory titles that one "Behavior Modification in Health Coaching."
• ⚠ Do not assume this course satisfies a requirement written against "Perspectives in Health." Carry a syllabus, and check with the receiving programme rather than matching on the number.
• This repository treats a number carrying two genuinely different subjects as a case for separate guides — a -SCNS version and an institution version. That determination is pending on the state catalog for this course; in the meantime this guide documents what UWF actually teaches.

⚠⚠ Behaviour analysis carries a formal ethics code, and the field is actively contested

• The Behavior Analyst Certification Board publishes an enforceable ethics code, and practitioners are accountable to it. It is not advisory.
• ⚠⚠ Consent and assent are central. Behaviour change procedures are frequently applied to people who cannot easily refuse — children, people with intellectual or developmental disability, patients in institutions. That asymmetry of power is the ethical core of the field, and a course that treats it as procedure rather than substance is teaching it badly.
• ⚠ Restrictive and aversive procedures are constrained by the code, by law, and by professional consensus, and the least restrictive effective alternative is the standard.
• ⚠⚠ Autistic self-advocates have raised substantive criticisms of ABA as historically practised — particularly around compliance-focused goals, suppression of harmless behaviour such as stimming, and reported long-term harm. These criticisms are part of the field's current debate rather than external noise, and a student entering this area should engage with them directly rather than encountering them later.
• Goal selection is where the ethics actually lives. Whether a behaviour should be changed at all — and who benefits from changing it — is a prior question to how to change it.
• Certification is a defined route. BCaBA and BCBA credentials require specified coursework from an approved sequence, supervised fieldwork, and an examination — ⚠ confirm with the department whether these courses form part of a verified course sequence, because that determines whether they count toward certification.

⚠⚠ Health data invites causal error, and this is the field where it does damage

• Association is not causation, and most population health data is observational.
• ⚠ Confounding by socioeconomic position is pervasive. An analysis that attributes an outcome to a behaviour without accounting for income, education, housing and access usually ends up blaming the affected population for a structural problem.
• ⚠⚠ The ecological fallacy is the specific trap — inferring something about individuals from a group-level pattern. Two things being common in the same county does not mean the same people have both.
• Statistical significance is not practical importance. A large dataset detects differences too small to act on.
• ⚠ Health information is a crowded and unreliable environment. Distinguishing evidence from advocacy, and both from marketing, is a core professional skill rather than a classroom exercise.

⚠⚠ Social determinants dominate outcomes, and the field has to say so

• Medical care is a modest contributor to population health outcomes compared with income, housing, education, food security and environment. That finding is robust and is inconvenient for a system organised around treatment.
• ⚠⚠ An intervention that ignores determinants fails and then blames the participant. "Non-adherence" is frequently a description of a barrier the programme did not assess — transport, cost, working hours, childcare, literacy, or trust.
• ⚠ Florida is a Medicaid non-expansion state, which leaves a documented coverage gap for adults earning too much for Medicaid and too little for subsidies. Anyone working in community health here meets that gap constantly, and knowing the real referral routes — federally qualified health centres, free clinics, county health departments — is practical knowledge.
• Health disparities in Florida are documented and specific, and vary sharply by county, race and rurality. Florida CHARTS makes this visible at county level and is the natural starting point.
• ⚠ Cultural humility beats cultural competence as a working stance — asking the person in front of you rather than applying a group characteristic.

Course format and position in the curriculum

• Lecture and discussion; assessment normally combines examination with applied written work.
• ⚠ No permission marking and no co-requisite is published for this course — HSC is a lighter-touch prefix than UWF's clinical health prefixes, and enrolment is not gated on cohort admission.
• UWF publishes no contact hours or terms of offering for any course. Confirm the offering pattern with the department.

How Florida course levels affect transfer

The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement. ⚠ For health sciences there is an additional consideration: CHES eligibility is assessed on course content against NCHEC's Areas of Responsibility, not on course titles or numbers — so keep syllabi and catalog descriptions for every health course you take, because they are the evidence a credentialing body will want.

HSC3102 is 3 semester hours at the University of West Florida.