Compliance and quality in residential life. Analyzing the impact of regulations on residential ecology.

Viewed from a behavior analytic perspective as a form of verbal behavior, regulatory rules affect the behavior of service providers in residential programs directly and indirectly; they can facilitate habilitative services or exert a powerful counter-habilitative influence. Because regulations are written to apply to the general case, regulatory rules tend to become decontextualized, often failing to address (a) the needs of individuals and (b) specific environmental circumstances. Ecobehavioral analysis of rule-governed behavior in residential settings can provide a means of understanding and measuring the effects of regulatory rules. Feedback from field settings about the effects of regulatory rules on the behavior of people who live and work in residential settings would help to recontextualize the rule-making process and promote better correspondence between the intended effects of regulations and their actual effects.