Stacy Carter, a professor in the special education program in the College of Education, co-authored a second edition of his comprehensive book on social validity.
Social validity is a concept used in behavior intervention research and practice. It focuses on the social significance of the goals of treatment, the social appropriateness of intervention techniques used and the social importance of outcomes achieved.
Carter's book, titled The Social Validity Manual: Subjective Evaluations of Interventions, provides background on the development of social validity, an overview of current research and guidelines for expanding the practice of social validation. It also offers detailed information on scales and methods for measuring social validity across the goals, procedures and effects of treatments used in various fields.
The second edition, published in June, incorporates advances in research findings and offers two new chapters on the use of social validity in the health sciences and how social validity plays an important role in increasing cultural awareness. The first edition was published in 2009.
"There have been numerous developments in the examination of social validity, and this second edition of the Social Validity Manual is an attempt to continue recognizing some of these more recent developments," Carter said. "Advancement in social validity measurement have not only been in the area of applied behavior analysis, but also in the health sciences fields such as nursing, medicine, speech/language pathology, psychotherapy, dentistry and more."
Carter co-authored the edition with John J. Wheeler, a professor in the Department of Educational Foundations and Special Education at East Tennessee State University.
Carter is a Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA) and a Nationally Certified School Psychologist (NCSP). He is also a certified special education teacher, a Licensed Behavior Analyst (LBA) in two states and a Licensed Specialist in School Psychology (LSSP). He has over 20 years of experience working as a behavior analyst in developmental centers, psychiatric hospitals, community living situations and school settings. He is currently leading a study of the social validity of various strategies to curb gun violence in schools and universities.