Building on the foundational designs covered in PSY8301, PSY8307 addresses the more complex methodological decisions doctoral-level behavior analysis research demands — combining design elements, isolating which specific intervention components actually drive behavior change, and establishing that findings generalize beyond a single, narrow demonstration.
Combined and hybrid designs
Addressing limitations of any single basic design
- Multiple baseline across behaviors, settings, and participants: PSY8307 examines decision-making about which multiple baseline variant best fits a given research question, and the relative strength of evidence each provides for demonstrating experimental control
- Combining elements: Many dissertation-level studies combine design elements — for example, embedding a brief reversal phase within an otherwise multiple baseline design to strengthen the demonstration of experimental control while still avoiding withdrawing an effective intervention for an extended period
- Selecting a design to fit ethical and practical constraints: The course emphasizes that design selection is not purely a methodological exercise but must account for real ethical constraints (the inappropriateness of withdrawing an effective intervention for a dangerous behavior) and practical constraints (the number of available participants or settings)
Changing criterion designs
PSY8307 covers the changing criterion design, a single-subject design well-suited to behaviors being gradually shaped toward a terminal goal (rather than behaviors expected to change abruptly with intervention) — the design involves systematically and incrementally changing the criterion required for reinforcement across successive phases, with behavior expected to track each successive criterion shift, demonstrating experimental control through this stepwise correspondence rather than through a withdrawal or staggered-baseline logic. The course examines appropriate applications (gradually increasing the duration or amount of a target behavior, such as exercise duration or sustained attention) and the specific data patterns needed to demonstrate adequate experimental control within this design.
Component analyses
The course covers component (or parametric) analyses, designed to isolate which specific element of a multi-component intervention package is actually responsible for observed behavior change — a critical methodological question given that many real-world applied behavior analysis interventions combine multiple components (for example, a token economy combined with verbal praise and modeling), making it unclear from a simple pre-post comparison which component, or combination of components, is doing the active work. PSY8307 examines component analysis logic (systematically adding or removing individual components across conditions while holding others constant) and its dissertation-level relevance for researchers aiming to make precise, parsimonious claims about active treatment mechanisms rather than simply demonstrating that an undifferentiated treatment package works.
Generality and social validity
PSY8307 extends single-subject methodology into questions of generality (the extent to which findings extend beyond the specific behavior, setting, and participants studied — established primarily through systematic replication, consistent with the field's broader emphasis on replication as the basis for establishing generality) and social validity (whether the goals, procedures, and outcomes of an intervention are considered acceptable and meaningful by relevant stakeholders — a concept introduced by Montrose Wolf in 1978 and treated as an essential, not optional, component of rigorous applied behavior analysis research). The course frames social validity assessment as essential to dissertation-level work specifically because demonstrating that an intervention produces statistically or experimentally reliable behavior change is not sufficient on its own if that change is not socially meaningful or acceptable to the people affected by it.
PSY8307 assignments include advanced design selection papers, component analysis proposals, and social validity assessment plans
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Advanced design selection papers, component analysis proposals, social validity plans, generality/replication analyses.
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Frequently asked questions
The concept of social validity occupies a central place in PSY8307's coverage of advanced methodology because it directly addresses a concern that purely experimental rigor, on its own, cannot resolve — and Montrose Wolf's 1978 paper introducing the concept argued explicitly that without attention to social validity, applied behavior analysis research risks becoming methodologically impressive but practically and ethically hollow. Wolf proposed that social validity be assessed across three distinct dimensions, each addressing a different way an intervention could be experimentally sound yet still fail to be genuinely valuable: the social significance of the goals (is the specific behavior being targeted for change actually important and meaningful to the client and relevant stakeholders, or has the researcher simply selected a behavior that happens to be convenient to measure and manipulate, regardless of whether changing it actually improves the client's life in a way that matters to them); the social appropriateness of the procedures (are the specific intervention procedures used to produce behavior change acceptable to the client and other relevant stakeholders, considering factors like the procedures' intrusiveness, restrictiveness, and whether less intrusive alternatives that might produce comparable results were adequately considered before more intrusive procedures were selected); and the social importance of the effects (is the resulting magnitude and pattern of behavior change actually large enough, and in the right form, to make a meaningful practical difference in the client's life, as judged by people who know the client and the relevant context, rather than simply being statistically or experimentally "significant" in a technical methodological sense that may not translate to real-world importance). The reason this three-part framework is treated as essential rather than optional in rigorous applied behavior analysis research, and why PSY8307 covers it directly alongside core experimental design content rather than as a separate ethics afterthought, is that a study could in principle satisfy every standard of internal experimental validity — a methodologically airtight demonstration of a functional relationship between an intervention and a measured behavior change, with rock-solid evidence of experimental control — while still representing poor or even harmful applied practice, if the targeted behavior wasn't actually important to the client, if the procedures used were unnecessarily intrusive or aversive relative to viable alternatives, or if the resulting behavior change, however reliably demonstrated, was too small or poorly generalized to matter in the client's actual life outside the research context. This is precisely the gap social validity assessment is designed to close: it requires the researcher to systematically gather the perspective of the client, caregivers, or other relevant stakeholders on each of these three dimensions, treating their judgment as a legitimate and necessary part of evaluating whether the research and intervention succeeded, not merely as a supplementary courtesy check performed after the methodologically "real" work of demonstrating experimental control is already complete.