Developing a measurement tool for assessing animal-assisted activity effectiveness on children with special...

Area of Science:

• Special Education
• Animal-Assisted Interventions
• Behavioral Assessment

Background:

• Children with special education needs often exhibit unique social interactive behaviors.
• Animal-assisted activity (AAA) presents a unique context for observing social behaviors.
• Existing tools may not adequately capture social interactions during AAA for this population.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop an observational tool for assessing social interactive behaviors of children with special education needs (SEN) during AAA.
• To evaluate the reliability and validity of the developed observational tool.

Main Methods:

• The study involved two phases: tool development and evaluation.
• Tool development included literature reviews and expert interviews.
• A pilot study with 138 children with intellectual disability in Hong Kong examined the tool's psychometric properties.

Main Results:

• An initial 26-variable tool was refined to a final 7-variable instrument.
• The final tool demonstrated strong inter-rater reliability (0.81).
• The tool showed satisfactory validity, significantly distinguishing between students with intellectual disabilities (p < 0.05).

Conclusions:

• A validated observational tool for social behaviors in children with SEN during AAA was successfully developed.
• Further extensive studies are recommended to fully evaluate the instrument's utility.