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. 2010 Spring;3(1):13–21. doi: 10.1007/BF03391754

Toward Effective and Preferred Programming: A Case for the Objective Measurement of Social Validity with Recipients of Behavior-Change Programs

Gregory P Hanley 1,✉
PMCID: PMC3004679  PMID: 22479668

Abstract

The adoption of effective behavioral interventions and teaching strategies for young children is largely influenced by the extent to which stakeholders find the procedures appropriate and the effects important. Stakeholder values have been described by measures of social validity in applied behavior analysis, and these measures have been a part of behavior-analytic research and practice since their important characteristics were described in the late 1970s. The typically subjective nature of the social validation process appears, however, to have marginalized children and other usual recipients of behavior-change procedures (i.e., individuals with autism or intellectual disabilities) from social validation processes. Therefore, the importance of including recipients of behavior-change procedures in the social validation process and methods for doing so are described in this paper.

Keywords: Autism, choice, concurrent chains, intellectual disability, preference, recipient inclusion, social validity

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