Types of Validity
This type of validity seeks to identify the “active ingredient” responsible for behavior change within a multi-component intervention.
What is construct validity?
The practice of examining level, trend, variability, immediacy of effect, overlap, and consistency across phases to determine intervention effects.
What is visual analysis?
A researcher records whether a behavior occurs at any time during each interval, a method that tends to overestimate the actual level of behavior.
What is partial-interval recording?
This design allows researchers to compare two or more interventions by rapidly alternating them within the same participant.
What is an alternating treatments design?
The direction of data points within a phase, indicating whether behavior is increasing, decreasing, or stable.
What is a trend?
A study shows that a reading intervention improved performance in one specialized clinic but provides no evidence that it would work in typical classrooms; this limitation reflects weak ________.
What is external validity?
Demonstrating similar intervention effects across different participants, settings, or behaviors to strengthen causal conclusions.
What is replication?
A measurement system that captures every instance of behavior, providing the highest level of precision but often requiring significant time and resources.
What is continuous measurement?
Demonstrating that behavior remains stable in untreated tiers while changing only in the treated tier illustrates this logical component of single-case designs.
What is verification?
When data from baseline and intervention phases share many similar values, this weakens evidence of a functional relation.
What is data overlap between phases?
This type of validity focuses on whether data patterns and analyses allow accurate conclusions about intervention effects.
What is data-evaluation validity?
This concept refers to the ability of a research design to demonstrate that changes in behavior are a direct result of manipulating the independent variable, typically shown through prediction, verification, and replication.
What is experimental control?
When a behavior occurs at very low frequencies but carries significance, this measurement approach, often using categories such as “occurred” or “did not occur,” is recommended.
What is discrete categorization?
When improvement in one tier of a multiple-baseline design unintentionally influences another tier, this threat to internal validity is present.
What is interdependence of baselines?
Following the introduction of an intervention, behavior changes immediately and consistently across three separate tiers of a multiple-baseline design, ruling out history and maturation.
What is strong experimental control demonstrated through replication?
This type of validity is considered foundational because without it, conclusions about generalization or mechanisms are meaningless.
What is internal validity?
Observers may consistently agree with each other yet still misrepresent the client’s true behavior, demonstrating that agreement is not a substitute for this measurement quality.
What is accuracy?
Elevated agreement percentages resulting from very high or very low rates of behavior highlight the influence of this statistical phenomenon on measurement interpretation.
What are base-rate effects (or chance agreement)?
Selecting a nonconcurrent multiple-baseline design requires careful reporting of real time, number of days in baseline, and number of sessions to adequately control for this overarching concern.
What is internal validity?
A researcher observes clear separation between baseline and intervention phases, minimal overlap, immediate level changes, and consistent replication across tiers. Collectively, these features support this overarching conclusion.
What is the demonstration of a functional relation between the independent and dependent variables?
A study shows that an intervention causes increased student engagement in a clinic setting. However, the effects do not generalize to classrooms, and the behavior change is attributed to adult attention rather than the intended mechanism. These are the types of validity demonstrated.
What are strong internal validity but weak external and construct validity?
Behavior changes only when the intervention is introduced, and this pattern is replicated across phases, demonstrating prediction, verification, and replication.
What is experimental control demonstrating a functional relation?
A researcher evaluates a student’s “on-task behavior,” defined as sustained engagement with academic materials, but records only the number of times the student begins working. This results in data that fail to represent the intended behavioral dimension.
What is a mismatch between the behavioral dimension and the measurement system (frequency used instead of duration)?
This limitation of a changing-criterion design occurs when behavior fails to systematically match each programmed criterion shift, indicating that the behavior is not under the control of the changing criteria.
What is a failure to demonstrate experimental control?
The combination of repeated measurement, stable baselines, systematic phase manipulation, and the logic of prediction, verification, and replication enables single-case research to produce this type of scientific conclusion.
What is convincing causal evidence (or a functional relation between the independent and dependent variables)?