Chuck Merbitz, PhD
Lauri Yablick, PhD
Chuck and Nancy Merbitz are this association’s love story––at least the one that went public. And that was to have been the focus of this profile, with bits about each of them building to a crescendo of met, married, and lived happily ever after.
Sorry, wrong writer. Nancy realized it first, listening to her husband’s half of the phone interview while she drove home. After devoting about thirty seconds to met, married, etc., Chuck and I had wandered into a tale of applied behavior analysis that would tower menacingly over any romance that dared spill on the same page. Someone has to tend the hedge between office and home; this time, Nancy held the clippers.
Chuck Merbitz is plenty. While downloading his curriculum vitae, I had to reload the printer paper twice. Pages two through twenty-one list publications. Merbitz laughed when I mentioned this. “I’ve only written two that anybody reads. Both were published in the Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation.” The first was in 1985, looking at the frequency of pressure relief activity among wheelchair users. Merbitz became decidedly more animated describing his 1989 paper, “Ordinal scales and the foundations of misinference.”
WAIT! Don’t go! The story was sanitized for clinicians who made it through research methods and statistics on nicotine and jet fuel.
Merbitz and his coauthors took on the misuse of ordinal scales to track rehabilitation outcomes, particularly the Functional Independence Measure (FIM), which had just recently taken flight as the definitive tool in clinical settings. Merbitz didn’t consider the paper revolutionary, and was a bit chuffed that it overshadowed his paper on communication analysis, published in the same issue. “When your numbers are ordinal, you can’t add them up! It’s not like no one ever heard of this concept,” he says. “The paper drew seven critical letters, more than they’d ever received. They created a special section for the publication of an invited article with an opposing view, and published all of the letters, along with our response.”
The fun was in the fight, but Merbitz is incisive in his concern about how illusory measurement affects rehabilitation practice. “Clinicians feel bad about this; they’re under pressure to give low scores on admission and high scores on discharge,” he says. “Those numbers drive time and energy, by people who never enter a room with the patient. Money is directed to where we get the most movement on FIM scores, regardless of whether it is best for the patient.”
Merbitz was indoctrinated into Skinner’s radical behavioral model from the outset of his career, and has followed it skeptically throughout. “I was rejected by the University of Florida, but one of the faculty there chalked it up to a bureaucratic error and encouraged me to come anyway,” he recalls with good humor. “I had an undistinguished undergraduate record with few bright spots, but he knew my sister, and was betting on genetics, GREs, and selective reinforcement to bring out a consistently better performance.”
He has remained true to the behavioral perspective throughout his career, and talks about scientific measurement with rare enthusiasm and clarity that he tailors adroitly to the level of the listener. I had expressed a primitive opinion about the FIM, and he responded patiently. “When someone walks up to a stimulus and says, ‘This is icky,’ I treat that seriously. It’s very strong data.” Nancy Merbitz agrees, and has had ample opportunity for observation. “He is very dedicated to his students as well as people with disabilities,” she says. “He is ‘on’ almost all the time, ready to talk about better methods and better outcomes at the drop of a hat.”
Befitting a behaviorist, Chuck Merbitz’s actions are the true measure of his beliefs. Nearly two years ago he left his secure and satisfying position at the Illinois Institute of Technology to create a master’s program in Applied Behavior Analysis at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology. “Nancy was instrumental in helping with that decision,” he says, mindful that his cushy slide towards retirement had taken a sharp detour. “We are about to graduate our first class, and are working frantically to bring it all together.” Once satisfied that the master’s program is on solid footing, he intends to launch a doctoral program.
Nancy Merbitz’s support is evident. “He has always wanted to bring behavioral methods of intervention, research design, and measurement to help each individual client and clinician figure out what works for whom––he is quite uninterested in what statistics might tell us about group averages. He hopes that someday soon, Applied Behavior Analysts will have a place within medical rehabilitation, including work with folks after spinal cord injury.”
Chuck Merbitz has been active in his commitment to many professional organizations, including AASCIPSW. He chaired the outcome measures task force, and worked on the task force that produced the first edition of the Standards for Psychologists and Social Workers in SCI. He has served on the clinical practice and internet committees, and completed two terms on the board of directors.
Because he does not work directly with individuals after SCI, Merbitz annually wrestles with the question of whether he is making a meaningful contribution to the field and to our association. At a purely behavioral level, the data speak volumes.