Establishing a Scale for Assessing the Social Validity of Skill Building Interventions for Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
The three-factor STP scale gives you a fast, reliable read on how much parents and teachers accept your skill-building plan for young autistic clients.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team built a short rating scale called the STP. It asks parents and teachers how acceptable they find skill-building programs for young children with autism.
They ran a psychometric study to check if the scale is reliable and if its three parts hold steady.
What they found
The STP stayed in three clean factors and showed good internal consistency.
It also separated high-rated programs from low-rated ones, so you can tell which plans families like.
How this fits with other research
Tavassoli et al. (2012) also made a three-factor parent scale, but theirs tracks autism parenting stress instead of intervention acceptability. Same structure, different target.
Boxum et al. (2018) created the PAFAS, another brief parent tool. PAFAS looks at family adjustment, while STP zooms in on whether people like the intervention itself.
Scahill et al. (2024) filled a different gap with a sleep scale. Together these papers show a trend: short, specific scales beat long general ones when time is tight.
Why it matters
You now have a one-page scale that tells you if parents and teachers buy in to your program. Run the STP before you start and after a few weeks. If scores dip, tweak the plan with the team instead of waiting for dropouts. Quick feedback keeps everyone on board and saves hours of rework later.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This study evaluated the psychometric properties of the Scale of Treatment Perceptions (STP), a measure of treatment acceptability targeting skill-building interventions for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This scale utilizes a strength-based approach to intervention assessment, and was established by modifying the Behavior Intervention Rating Scale (Elliott and Von Brock Treuting in J School Psychol 29(1):43-51, 1991. doi: 10.1016/0022-4405(91)90014-I ) and the Treatment Evaluation Inventory (Kazdin in J Appl Behav Anal 13(2):259-273, 1980. doi: 10.1901/jaba.1980.13-259 ) to be appropriate for assessing multiple dimensions of acceptability across skill-building ASD treatments. Overall, the STP demonstrated good psychometric properties: the scale had appropriate internal consistency, demonstrated a stable three-factor structure that was invariant across samples, and discriminated among different skill-building treatments for ASD. This has important implications for dissemination, as perceived acceptability of a treatment relates to treatment utilization and adherence.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2016 · doi:10.1007/s10803-016-2863-9