Excel also offers a number of data-management capabilities that make it an attractive software program for working graphs (e.g., in-cell calculations) and post-hoc data analysis (e.g., Solver for model fits). Although behavior analysts have numerous software options for creating visual displays of their data (e.g., GraphPad Prism, Microsoft Excel, Systat SigmaPlot), most behavior analysts use Microsoft Excel (Haddock & Iwata, in press), probably due to Excel’s wide availability, its low cost, and the published technical articles on using Excel to create graphs depicting single-case analyses ( Barton & Reichow, 2012 Carr & Burkholder, 1998 Dixon et al., 2009). Most clinicians and researchers today use computer software to generate graphs for visual-inspection purposes ( Haddock & Iwata, in press).

Visual representation and inspection of data is a key feature of behavior analytic research and practice, and is the primary means of examining relations between environmental variables and behavior ( Bourret & Pietras, 2012). We discuss these findings relative to challenges of developing efficient and effective staff-training tutorials. Social-validity measures found the posttraining graphs to be significantly better than publication quality. All four technicians showed mastery-level graphing accuracy with accompanying increases in efficiency following training, which maintained at follow-up without direct feedback from an expert behavior analyst. We evaluated the effects of a video-modeling tutorial on graphing performance in Prism using a multiple-baseline design. Our review identified nine commonly recommended features, and Prism facilitated the creation of graphs with those features.

In this investigation, we (a) define the desirable features of publication-quality, single-case design graphs based on recommendations in the scholarly literature, (b) suggest GraphPad Prism as a suitable graphing program for creating graphs with those features, and (c) develop and validate a video-modeling tutorial designed to train behavior technicians to create such graphs.

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