Acceptability assessment of school psychology interventions from 2005 to 2017

Recommendations from multiple professional organizations (e.g., American Psychological Association, Council for Exceptional Children, National Association of School Psychologists) suggest that collection of data on the social validity in practice and research is necessary. The purpose of this study was to systematically review the inclusion of acceptability measurement, which has been one of the most common way to measure social validity, within the intervention literature published across five school psychology journals between 2005 and 2017. Findings suggested just over one third of intervention studies included acceptability assessment. Intervention studies that were delivered individually, targeted behavior skills, and included treatment integrity data were significantly more likely to include acceptability assessment. When acceptability was measured it was typically evaluated one-time following treatment completion using self-report tools completed by teachers. Nearly half of studies employed one of seven published tools and the remaining half used researcher-created measures. The published tools were adapted in a variety of ways and inconsistently reported either item or total scores making it difficult to summarize these data according to intervention target or delivery format. Implications of findings are described.