Comparing paired‐stimulus and multiple‐stimulus concurrent‐chains preference assessments: Consistency, correspondence, and efficiency
Use two-item concurrent-chains preference tests to cut assessment time while keeping the same accurate rank order.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Basile and team compared two ways to find out what kids like. One way shows two items at a time and asks the child to pick. The other way shows many items at once and asks the child to pick.
They used an alternating-treatments design. Each child tried both ways. The researchers recorded which items the child chose most often and how long each test took.
What they found
The two-item method gave the same top choices as the many-item method. The two-item method finished faster.
This means you can learn what a child prefers in less time without losing accuracy.
How this fits with other research
Lemons et al. (2015) already showed a shortcut: once you know the child loves gummy candy, any new gummy will probably work. Basile adds a second shortcut—use the faster two-item test to find that first favorite.
Matson et al. (1999) warned that food items steal the spotlight in big arrays. The two-item format in Basile keeps each pair fair, so food does not crowd out toys.
Conine et al. (2021) asked how many sessions you need with the many-item test. They found you can trim to two sessions but risk missing the very top item. Basile offers a different fix: keep the session, but switch to two-item trials and finish sooner.
Ford et al. (2022) later showed older adults with memory loss need single-item tests, not rank orders. Basile’s speed gain may not apply there; population matters.
Why it matters
If you run preference assessments often, swap in the two-item concurrent-chains format. You will finish quicker and still get the same reliable list of reinforcers. Less time testing means more time teaching.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Concurrent-chains preference assessments have been used to assess preferences for leisure activities, teaching strategies, behavioral interventions, and other protracted events. This assessment model involves presenting an array of representative stimuli (e.g., pictures or colored cards), providing participants with an opportunity to select a representative stimulus from the array, arranging access to the associated activity, and then rank-ordering activities based upon their accumulated selection frequency across trials. The predominant model for presenting stimuli has been one in which all stimuli are presented in arrays simultaneously (i.e., a multiple-stimulus model). Activities selected repeatedly are identified as highly preferred and are then sequentially removed from the array to determine a preference hierarchy. The current study compared this approach with an alternative in which representative stimuli were presented to participants in paired arrays. Assessments conducted in the paired-array format were completed more rapidly than the multiple-stimulus format with a high degree of correspondence between preference rankings generated by both approaches.
Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 2021 · doi:10.1002/jaba.856