Agreement between visual inspection and objective analysis methods: A replication and extension

Abstract

Behavior analysts typically rely on visual inspection of single-case experimental designs to make treatment decisions. However, visual inspection is subjective, which has led to the development of supplemental objective methods such as the conservative dual-criteria method. To replicate and extend a study conducted by Wolfe et al. (2018) on the topic, we examined agreement between the visual inspection of five raters, the conservative dual-criteria method, and a machine-learning algorithm (i.e., the support vector classifier) on 198 AB graphs extracted from clinical data. The results indicated that average agreement between the 3 methods was generally consistent. Mean interrater agreement was 84%, whereas raters agreed with the conservative dual-criteria method and the support vector classifier on 84% and 85% of graphs, respectively. Our results indicate that both objective methods produce results consistent with visual inspection, which may support their future use.