Alcohol as social lubricant.

This study examines how consuming alcohol differentially affects the communicative behavior and perceptions of high and low social self‐esteem (SSE) women as they engage in a brief interaction with a flirtatious male. Alcohol myopia theory proposes that alcohol affects behavior when it blocks a person's normal inhibitions about enacting a behavior. It was predicted that low SSE women would be more inhibited when talking to a flirtatious male than would high SSE women and, therefore administration of a social self‐esteem measure and random assignment to an alcoholic or nonalcoholic beverage condition, participants (N=50) talked with an attractive, flirtatious male confederate. Low SSE women were less anxious and self‐disclosed more when drinking than when sober, whereas high SSE women were not significantly affected by alcohol consumption. The discussion highlights the complex and often contradictory effects of alcohol consumption on social interaction.     

The effects of a token reinforcement procedure on bus ridership

Tokens, exchangeable for a variety of back-up reinforcers, were delivered for several days to all persons boarding a clearly marked campus bus. This procedure increased ridership to 150% of baseline. The experiment was carried out to demonstrate the applicability of operant techniques to urban transportation problems. In this study, a token reinforcement procedure was introduced in an attempt to increase bus ridership while holding the costs of reinforcers to a minimum and circumventing the problems of individual satiety and preferences and of delivering cumbersome reinforcers. A methodology for establishing a token-exchange procedure in an "open-field" behavior setting, where the subject population size, geographic location, preferences, age, sex, preferred hours of mobility, etc. are unspecified, is also presented.     

Consultee-centered consultation with a teacher as a technique in behavior management

Client-centered consultation was effective in helping a teacher to decrease one child's disruptive classroom behavior, and consultee-centered consultation helped the teacher improve her control of the class as a whole. Initially, a client-centered reinforcement program effectively decreased the disruptive behavior of one target child. Later, attention to the teacher's feelings about being the authority figure in the classroom was used in an attempt to modify the behavior of the entire class. The data describing the behavior of a second child in the classroom suggested that this consultee-centered consultation was followed by less classroom disruption. In addition, anecdotal observations indicated that consultee-centered consultation was effective in modifying the behavior of both the teacher and the rest of the class.     

Social validity: Perceptions of check and connect with early literacy support

This article underscores the potential advantages of qualitative methods to illustrate the depth and complexity of social validity. This investigation evaluates the social validity of Check and Connect with Early Literacy Support (CCEL), through the perspectives of teachers and caregivers whose children participated in the intervention. Teachers from six classrooms and caregivers from six families participated in evaluating the social validity of this intervention using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. Participants completed the Treatment Acceptability Rating Scale—Revised (TARF-R; Reimers, T. M., Wacker, D. P., Cooper, L. J. & DeRaad, A. O. (1992). Clinical evaluation of the variables associated with treatment acceptability and their relation to compliance. Behavioral Disorders, 18(1), 67-76.), a quantitative measure of treatment acceptability (a component of social validity), and were interviewed using qualitative interviews and focus groups. Results were analyzed through ethnographic methodology and indicate complex, reciprocal relationships among factors related to social validity. This investigation is considered in light of recent efforts to develop a systematic approach to evaluate the adequacy of intervention research using qualitative methods.