Developing a measurement tool for assessing animal-assisted activity effectiveness on children with special educational needs’ socialization: A pilot study

Objective: This study aimed to develop an observational tool to assess the social interactive behaviors of children with special education needs during animal-assisted activity and to examine its reliability and validity. Methods: The study comprised two phases: developing and evaluating the measurement tool. The tool was created through literature reviews and expert interviews. The pilot observational study was conducted in a special educational school in Hong Kong, China, involving 138 children with intellectual disability participating in animal-assisted activity sessions to examine the tool’s reliability and validity. Results Initially, the measurement tool included 26 observational variables across three dimensions (inter-rater reliability of 0.74). After excluding variables with low discriminability, the final tool contained seven observational variables. The tool demonstrated strong reliability (inter-rater reliability of 0.81) and satisfactory validity, significantly discriminating among different intellectually disabled students ( p s < 0.05). Conclusions: This study developed and validated an observational tool for measuring the social behaviors of children with special education need during animal-assisted activity sessions. More extensive studies are needed to further evaluate the instrument.