Evaluating the stability, validity, and utility of hierarchies produced by the Social Interaction Preference Assessment
SIPA ranks social reinforcers for kids with autism, but you must repeat it to catch shifting preferences.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team gave the Social Interaction Preference Assessment to children with autism several times.
They wanted to see if the SIPA rank list stayed the same and if the top items really worked as reinforcers during teaching.
Each child completed the SIPA more than once, then the staff used the high-ranked social interactions in skill-building sessions.
What they found
The SIPA lists moved around. A social item that ranked first on Monday could drop on Friday.
Even with the shifts, the items that scored high on the SIPA still helped the children learn new skills.
The tool pointed to useful social reinforcers, but one round was not enough to lock the order.
How this fits with other research
Morris et al. (2019) showed the SIPA could pick a favorite social interaction the first time. The 2020 study checks if that first pick stays in place and finds it often does not.
Melanson et al. (2023) saw the same drift inside repeated MSWO toy assessments. Together the papers warn that preference orders, whether for toys or people, need refreshers.
Kamlowsky et al. (2025) add that social context can boost how much a toy itself is worth. Their work extends the SIPA idea: social elements change value, so reassessment matters even more.
Why it matters
Run the SIPA at least twice before you write a treatment plan. Treat the second run as your baseline and plan to re-check every few weeks. This habit keeps your social reinforcers strong and your teaching efficient.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Morris and Vollmer (2020) evaluated a novel method of assessing preference for social interaction, which they called the Social Interaction Preference Assessment (SIPA), and found it often produced hierarchies similar to a concurrent operant reinforcer assessment. We replicated and extended these findings. In study 1, we evaluated the stability of the SIPA hierarchies by conducting multiple SIPAs with 5 participants diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). In Study 2, we evaluated the validity and utility of these hierarchies by providing different social interactions as consequences for skill acquisition tasks with 3 participants from the first study. Varying degrees of stability in the SIPA hierarchies and a high level of correspondence between these hierarchies and rates of acquisition during the reinforcer assessment were observed. These findings and their implications are discussed.
Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 2020 · doi:10.1002/jaba.610