ABA Switzerland

By Silja Wirth
In 2022 ABA Switzerland was again eager to provide attractive CEU opportunities for their members.

First, we welcomed Jacob Sadavoy and Joy Johnson who held a captivating talk on how to navigate parents’ wishes, client’s values, practitioner’s bias, and assessment inflexibility. They shared perspectives from professionals and autistic self-advocates and truly expanded everybody’s horizons in this ethics webinar.

In May Timothy Folley presented the behavior analytic perspective of trauma and attachment.

Next up we had Shane Spiker return to present a webinar on how to foster trainee relationships that aren’t horror stories. He provided important insights for supervisors, and we were able to provide supervision CEUs for
our members.

Lastly, we had Brielle Spangenberg and Erika Emery presenting on setting the groundwork for friendships and how to promote social learning opportunities for children with autism.

Members of ABA Switzerland have been involved in teaching ABA in a 3-year-course on early intensive intervention for children with autism. Thus, the science of ABA was spread more widely in the country this year. The ABA masters in Geneva has been postponed but is hopefully going to start in September of 2023.

As in previous years we continued our work in collaborating with other European countries. We are still part of the advisory group for the EuroBA project. We meet regularly with ONPAC (Organisation Nationale des Professionnels en Analyse du Comportement) in France and ABA Germany. Additionally, a representative of ABA Switzerland attended the European conference on Behavior Analysis in Milan, organized by AARBA.

ABA Switzerland also became active when we heard about the JRC controversy regarding ABAI. We had a conversation with the board of ABAI and wrote a position statement regarding ABA Switzerland’s perspective on the use of contingent skin shock in ABA interventions. We were very relieved when we heard that ABAI has decided to also distance themselves clearly from any such use of punishment within the field of ABA. We are happy to continue our affiliation with ABAI and value the time and engagement they devoted to this important ethical issue.

In order to achieve more for ABA in Switzerland, we have decided to extend our board and have taken on two additional people as advisory board members. Due to their engagement, we hope to gain more momentum in the months to come. And we continue to work on our social media presence: our new student representative has created a Facebook group for students of ABA in Switzerland.

Towards the end of the year, we realized that we needed to redo and update our website in order to reach more people, make selling our webinars easier, be more attractive and informative to our members, and have a more interactive platform with professionals and consumers of ABA in Switzerland. We got several offers from different providers, gained our members’ approval to spend a big part of our funds, and started the process of getting a new website ready. Currently, it is in the making and the board is devoting a lot of resources to rewriting texts, creating a nice layout, and optimizing the design.

As the BABC withdrew from Europe at the end of this year, ABA Switzerland has stepped up to take over some of the tasks. We started designing a registry that will list qualified professionals in Switzerland and are getting ready to publish this registry on our new website. We would
like to provide a continued point of reference for
consumers to check a professional’s credentials when enlisting their services.