Trends in the measurement of social validity.
ABA studies have ignored client opinion for decades, so start measuring social validity in every project.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Kennedy (1992) read every article in two big ABA journals from 1968 to 1990. The goal was to see how often studies asked clients or parents if the treatment felt useful, fair, or important.
The team looked for any mention of social validity. They noted how it was measured and when.
What they found
Only 20 out of every 100 studies reported social validity at all. When it was reported, most used a short happy-or-not survey after the study ended.
Hardly any study compared results to typical peers or asked for input before starting.
How this fits with other research
Leif et al. (2024) repeated the same count for 2010-2020 and found the same low 18% rate. The field has not improved in 30 years.
Cohen et al. (2018) looked only at single-case special-ed studies from 2005-2016. They also found scant and sloppy social-validity work, backing the older warning.
Huntington et al. (2024) added a new twist: even when checks are done, people with disabilities are often left out of the survey. The old and new data together show both low use and low inclusion.
Why it matters
If four out of five studies skip social validity, we risk pushing treatments clients do not want or need. You can fix this today by adding two questions at baseline: "Is this goal important to you?" and "Do the steps feel okay?" Record the answers and adjust your plan before data collection starts.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Since its inception in the mid-1970s, social validity has provided applied behavior analysts with a critical measure of the social impact and importance of their interventions. Recent discussion, however, has questioned the use of this construct in regard to the frequency and types of social validty measures employed in research. Despite the ensuing discussion, virtually no quantitative information has been made available to frame various perspectives and opinions. The purpose of this report is to present a content analysis of social validity measures used over the previous 20 years. Social validity was assessed along three dimensions: (a) type of assessment, (b) focus of assessment, and (c) time of assessment. Articles published in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis (1968-1990) and Behavior Modification (1977-1990) were surveyed. The results of the content analysis indicate that current applications of social validation procedures are presented in 20% of the articles surveyed. The majority of articles used subjective evaluation of outcomes following intervention to assess social validity. In addition, the data indicated that normative comparison was a rarely used method of social validation and that its use has been decreasing over time.
The Behavior analyst, 1992 · doi:10.1007/BF03392597