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Although most scholars identify Wolf’s (1978) seminal article as describing the origins of social validity, a more careful analysis reveals earlier precursors. An inductive process of research began in 1967 that culminated in a set of goals and procedures that defined the concept of social validity (Fixsen, 2019). This process began when Wolf and his doctoral students established The Achievement Place Model in Lawrence, Kansas, which was a group home for six teenagers who were referred from the juvenile justice system. Lonnie and Elaine Phillips were the first “teaching home” parents and served a dual role as teachers and surrogate parents. Wolf and his students—Lonnie was one of his students—adopted single-case research methods as a mechanism to systematically address questions that arose during the daily treatment of the six youths. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, many interventions being evaluated focused on problem behavior because the individuals who were the focus of the interventions resided in restrictive environments that often occasioned problem behavior. Many of these interventions harbored an aversive component leveraging the principle of punishment and produced the goal of behavior reduction. Wolf and his students questioned the ethics, as well as the efficacy, of these interventions. Their response, as reflected in a prolific program of research, was to relinquish some level of control to allow the youths “to make decisions about their own lives and those of their peers” (Fixsen, 2019, p. 2) that resulted in a form of self-government. As part of this self-government component, the youths’ opinions and ratings were sought to evaluate how they were being treated (i.e., consequences for rule compliance and infractions) and whether they liked the teaching-parents and found them to be fair, consistent, and humorous. As an aside, these evaluations led to a provocative and fundamental quest to understand the concept of relationship or how well the teaching-parents related to the youths (Kirigin, Braukmann, Atwater, & Wolf, 1976). In addition to asking the youths for their feedback, Wolf and his students explored systematically the opinions of other consumers, relevant in the lives of the youths—parents, teachers, court personnel, police officers—to determine the social validity of the Achievement Place goals, methods, and outcomes. This now familiar concept was chronicled and documented in an extensive program of research lasting more than a decade. Although the concept of social validity was pioneered more than 40 years ago and identified as a quality indicator for single case research almost 15 years ago (Horner et al., 2005), the practice of social validity has not yet delivered on its promise. Too often investigators either omit it from their studies (Snodgrass, Chung, Meadan, & Halle, 2018) or they assess it in such a routine manner that its yield rarely informs the field about how to move forward. My goal in writing this brief piece is to critique two features of social validity and to recommend options to address them. My hope is to motivate researchers in early childhood special education to delve more deeply into the social validity of their investigations. In a recent manuscript submission to a journal for which I am a reviewer, the authors conducted an intervention study in which an investigator taught peers strategies for interacting with their fellow students who had severe disabilities. They conducted the typical, almost formulaic, social validity assessment by asking consumers (i.e., the students with disabilities, the peer partners who interacted with the students, and school staff) whether they liked spending time with each other, whether they enjoyed participating in the study, and whether the staff would continue using the intervention? The responses reflected their strong satisfaction with the intervention and the outcomes. However, before unquestionably accepting these results, as skeptical evaluators, we need to understand the context in which these data were gathered. Consumers’ verbal responses are subject to distortion (Skinner, 1953) due to conditions in which they are gathered (e.g., pleasing the investigator, positive bias due to having participated in the study). This does not imply that all social validity assessments are biased; however, it ought to motivate us to reduce as much as possible potential sources of bias. Please refer to Barton, Meadan-Kaplansky, and Ledford (2018) for a detailed discussion of recommendations. To improve the objectivity of the social validity assessment in the research study mentioned in the previous paragraph, an investigator might recruit experts or relevant consumers who were not involved in the study to view randomly selected video clips drawn from baseline and intervention sessions and presented in random sequence. Without knowing which clips were drawn from baseline and intervention, consumers would be asked to rate each one on a global measure of student/peer interaction to determine whether their ratings reflect differences that distinguish baseline from intervention clips. Wolf and his collaborators often conducted this type of social validity evaluation in the 1970s. Admittedly, this would be at some 873525 TECXXX10.1177/0271121419873525Topics in Early Childhood Special EducationEditorial editorial2019