The maintenance of behavioral change: The case for long-term follow-ups.

This article discusses response maintenance, the durability of behavior change after therapy, treatment, or training ends. Response maintenance is one of the three forms of generalized behavior change, with the others being setting/situation generalization and response generalization. Long-term maintenance of treatment effects is an important issue after behavior change has taken place and is the goal of most programs. Areas discussed include factors affecting the study of maintenance, techniques for programming it, and analyzing and evaluating strategies for promoting it. This article presents a number of long-term follow-ups of programs designed to treat the addictive behaviors of typical adults (Foxx, 1982; Foxx, Brown, & Katz, 1981) and to teach social skills (Foxx & Faw, 1992) and language (Foxx & Faw, 1990) to individuals with intellectual disabilities and autism as well as to decrease their severe maladaptive behaviors (Foxx, 1990; Foxx & Livesay, 1984). In the process, various factors that appeared to contribute to long-term maintenance are identified. The article concludes with some recommendations regarding the study of maintenance.