The Antecedent Is What You're Actually Trying to Find
The Behavior is what everyone sees. The Antecedent is what the analysis is trying to isolate. Six antecedent categories: Ignored, Material/Food Removed or Denied, Other request denied, Given instruction, Provoked by peer, No obvious trigger. The multi-select allows combinations — an incident can have multiple contributing antecedents, and recording all of them across dozens of incidents is what produces a functional behavioral assessment that goes beyond the obvious.
"Material/Food Removed" appearing consistently as an antecedent across 80% of screaming episodes that occur during transition times tells you something specific. "Given instruction" co-occurring with "Ignored" in the same incident tells you something different — possible demand avoidance combined with attention-seeking. The pattern is only visible when you're capturing the antecedent consistently, precisely, and at the moment it happens, not reconstructed in a session note at the end of the day.
Behavior and Consequence as the Clinical Vocabulary
Three behaviors: Biting Self, Environmental Destruction, Screaming. The specificity is deliberate — this isn't a generic behavior log, it's a log built for a specific case with specific target behaviors identified in the behavior support plan. The multi-select handles episodes where behaviors co-occur, which is common in more severe incidents.
Six consequence options: Attention/told to stop, Redirected, Material/food given, Instruction terminated, Walk away, Do nothing. The consequence field is the treatment fidelity measure. If the behavior plan specifies "extinction with redirection" and the logged consequence is consistently "Material/food given," you have a treatment fidelity problem that's visible in the data rather than buried in verbal reports.
An ABA therapist who sees "Instruction terminated" as the consequence across multiple incidents involving demand-avoidant behavior has identified an inadvertent reinforcement pattern — the behavior was working, which explains why it's persisting. That's the clinical insight that shapes the next behavior support plan revision.
Context Fields Reveal Environmental Triggers
Location (Home, School, Outside, Community, Other) and Activity (Solitary play, Social, Sitting/Sleeping, Other) are the environmental context variables that functional behavioral assessment requires. An incident that always occurs at School during Social activity but never occurs at Home during Solitary play isn't random — it's a specific environmental and social context that the intervention needs to target.
Duration adds the severity dimension: less than 5 minutes, 5-15 minutes, more than 15 minutes. A screaming episode that consistently exceeds 15 minutes has different clinical implications than one that consistently resolves in under 5. Escalation patterns, de-escalation strategies, and caregiver endurance thresholds all interact with duration.
The timestamped datetime field means that time-of-day patterns become visible. Incidents clustering in the 1400-1600 window every school day might correlate with end-of-day fatigue, scheduled activities, or a specific staff member's shift. The Notes field carries the narrative that the structured fields can't capture — the specific phrase that preceded the incident, an unusual event in the child's day, any relevant context that experienced eyes would want to know but that doesn't fit a dropdown.
After 200 logged incidents across three months, the database shows which antecedents are most prevalent, which behaviors co-occur most frequently, which consequence strategies are being used versus which are specified in the plan, and which environmental contexts produce the highest incident rates. That's the data a BCBA needs to write a meaningful quarterly progress report and to make an evidence-based decision about whether the current intervention is working.