Social Validity
The degree to which goals, procedures, and outcomes of an intervention are acceptable and meaningful to the people involved.
Social validity asks whether the people living with an intervention actually think it matters. Wolf (1978) framed it as three questions: Are the goals socially important? Are the procedures acceptable? Are the outcomes meaningful to the individual and their community?
This is where behaviour analysis has historically struggled. You can produce statistically significant reductions in a target behaviour using procedures that the family finds intrusive, that the learner finds humiliating, and that collapse the moment they leave the clinic. Technically successful. Socially invalid.
In practice, social validity means asking parents and teachers whether the plan is feasible before you finalise it, not after. It means choosing goals the learner's community actually cares about. And it means measuring outcomes they can see - not just frequency counts that mean nothing to a classroom teacher trying to get through a Friday afternoon.