Episode 270 - Assessing Social Validity

ABA Inside Track

If measuring social validity is just about getting clients and stakeholders to fill out a 7-point Likert scale, we’d have a pretty short episode this week. Fortunately, it’s a heck of a lot more important and effortful than that. This week we delve into the realm of using social validity measures to improve our practices and to better support our clients. So buckle-up for some thematic reviews of interviews, big picture practice examinations, and comparisons to how much better or worse things are since the 90s. At least, in relation to social validity measurement.

This episode is available for 1.0 LEARNING CEU.

Articles discussed this episode:

Schwartz, I.S. & Baer, D. (1991). Social validity assessments: Is current practice state of the art? Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 24, 189-204. doi: 10.1901/jaba.1991.24-189

Ferguson, J.L., Cihon, J.H., Leaf, J.B., Van Meter, S.M., McEachin, J., & Leaf, R. (2018). Assessment of social validity trends in the journal of applied behavior analysis. European Journal of Behavior Analysis, 20, 146-157. doi: 10.1080/15021149.2018.1534771

Callahan, K., Hughes, H.L., Mehta, S., Toussaint, K.A., Nichols, S.M., Ma, P.S., Kutlu, M., Wang, H. (2017). Social validity of evidence-based practices and emerging interventions in autism. Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities, 32, 18-197. doi: 10.1177/1088357616632446

Anderson, R., Taylor, S., Tayler, T. & Virues-Ortega, J. (2022). Thematic and textual analysis methods for developing social validity questionnaires in applied behavior analysis. Behavioral Interventions, 37, 732-753. doi: 10.1002/bin.1832

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