The BDB journal is especially relevant to behavior analysts who study the developmental processes responsible for behavior changes and their progressive organization. The BDB journal hopes to provide answers by looking at the biological and environmental factors that affect behavioral development, while maintaining primarily interest in the role of environmental contingencies in behavior change.

      The Behavioral Development Bulletin has focused on behavior-analytic functional relations in a developmental frame, that is, where those relationships are examined across two or more points in a developmental sequence.  The Journal’s emphases are upon environmental-unit behavior-unit interactions in basic and applied contexts, in mammalian species, and across any sequences or combinations of developmental points.  Species-specific considerations are taken into account in relation to the functional relationships.  Use of demographic independent variables is not encouraged, except when they could facilitate clearly uncovering the underlying behavioral processes.  Occasionally, the environment-behavior interactions in a developmental frame are grouped under a superordinate concept (e.g., "attachment," "learned helplessness"), to allow the behavior-analytic description/explanation to be evaluated against an alternative description/explanation.  More generally, the SIG examines also how different theoretical positions, within and without behavior analysis, approach identical questions.  The historical bases of behaviorism, and of behavior analysis as a scientific or applied field, may be examined as well.