Assessing the correspondence between stability of paired-stimulus preference assessment and progressive-ration data

Document Type

Thesis

College

College of Arts and Sciences

Department

Psychology

Degree

M.S. Applied Behavior Analysis

Date Completed

2018

First Committee Member

Bourret, Jason

Second Committee Member

Dickson, Chata

Third Committee Member

Pinkston, Jonathan

Abstract

"Stimulus preference assessments are used to identify a stimulus hierarchy, in which stimuli are ranked according to their relative reinforcing efficacy. Paired-stimulus preference assessments (PSPA) and progressive-ratio (PR) schedules have been used to determine the relative reinforcing efficacy of stimuli. The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the correspondence between and stability of PSPA and PR data for six edible stimuli across three participants. Data were collected on the percentage of trials with selection in the PSPA and response frequency in the PR. Several secondary analyses were conducted to aid in the interpretation of the data including the rank correspondence, the correlation between the average PSPA and average PR data, the relative variance, and the Kendall’s W coefficient of concordance. There was a moderate degree of correspondence between assessments for two of the four data sets and a low degree of correspondence for the remaining two data sets. Additionally, the PSPA data showed a relatively high degree of stability, whereas the PR schedule data were more variable and challenging to visually analyze. Results of the secondary analyses further supported these findings."

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