INVESTIGATING THE CURRENT STATE OF SOCIAL VALIDITY IN SCHOLARLY JOURNALS PUBLISHED BY THE COUNCIL FOR EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN

Social validity of interventions is often conceptualized as a triad of the social significance of goals, the acceptability of procedures, and the importance of intervention outcomes (Wolf, 1978). Social validity measurement is considered an essential part of quality single-case design studies. Yet, the practice has been inconsistently reflected in behavioral and educational journals. The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate the state of social validity in scholarly journals, published by the Council for Exceptional Children and its divisions between 2016 and 2020. The focus of the study was not only on the prevalence of social validity assessments in these journals, but also on possible relations between social validity and other elements of the study. The results indicate that 71.9% (220 of 306) of all single-case design studies published by the Council for Exceptional Children contained an assessment of social validity. Less prevalent was the assessment of Total Construct social validity, which included the measurement of social validity of goals, procedures, and outcomes. Participants’ ages were positively correlated with the presence of social validity assessments; however, studies involving both children and adults tended to favor adult voices in social validity reporting. The results also indicate that while the journals in the study compared favorably to other journals regarding social validity practices, there remains some room for improvement. Efforts should be made to diversify participants’ voices, elicit social validity responses from younger participants, improve the depth of social validity reporting, and broaden the range of tools to assess the social validity of interventions.