The fundamental challenge that faces early childhood intervention is to empower families with competencies and knowledge for enhancing young children’s opportunities for learning and development (e.g. Dunst, Bruder, Trivette, & Hamby, 2005). Recognized as the common thread conferring success to early childhood intervention, the approach of children as individuals situated within a family echoes fundamental assumptions of transactional models, which emphasize the importance of the continuous interactions with people and events in the immediate environment on human growth, development and learning. Consistently with this perspective, the focus of assessment has been moved from the child’s descriptions as an isolated individual towards the attention to his/her continuous interaction with familiar, social and environmental factors (Bagnato, Goins, Pretti-Frontczak, & Neisworth, 2014). These conceptual changes reflect in the child’s assessment process, recognizing the limitations of conventional testing in young children and requiring for methods and styles that favor authentic and natural developmental tasks in order to obtain information that allow a comprehensive portray of children’s functioning (Bagnato, Neisworth & Munson, 1997). Within this context, Bagnato (2007) highlights that professional standards for early childhood assessment must reflect eight critical qualities: 1) useful providing a linkage between assessment results and intervention; 2) acceptable, providing information mutually relevant to professionals and families; 3) authentic, providing information that describes how children function in their natural environments; 4) collaborative, involving professionals and parents in a partnership from assessment to intervention; 5) convergent, observing repeatedly by several individuals the status and progress of children 6) equitable, accommodating individual differences when selecting instructional materials; 7) sensitive, providing incremental developmental sequences and observations that can differentiate small increments of progress; 8) congruent, using content, materials, and methods that match the developmental levels and individual differences of children.

The Transdisciplinary Play-Based Assessment (TPBA) developed by Linder (1993, 2008) can be seen as a model that operationalizes such standards, since it assumes that play is an interactive and natural activity that functions as an important vehicle for the child’s social-emotional, communication, motor and cognitive development, as well as for the reflection of the child’s development. Therefore, in this model the child is assessed during play activities by a transdisciplinary team – including parents – who simultaneously looks at what the child is already doing and what she is able to do with support. Parents are considered as crucial members from the assessment team, due to their privileged knowledge and understanding about the child abilities, needs and routines. The approach is useful for children from birth to six years of age who are suspected of having a disability or developmental delay due to genetic, biological, environmental or other risk factors. The TPBA process is also useful to identity intervention recommendations and strategies for parents and professionals incorporate in the child’s daily routines. 

Linder (2008), just as proponents of other play-based assessment methods, have argued that research in early childhood assessment and intervention must address information regarding additional dimensions of validity – social validity –, further to the commonly study of content, criterion-related/concurrent and construct validity (DeBruin, 2005; Friedli, 1994; Kelly-Vance & Ryalls, 2008; Linder, Goldberg, & Goldberg, 2007; Linder & Linas, 2009). The social validity refers to the ecological value of the assessment information, the procedures that are used and the outcomes that are achieved evaluated by the consumers.  Typically, this involves asking consumers – parents, professionals or even children – to rate the acceptability, the accuracy and the utility of made assessments.

The purpose of this study was to assess the social validity of this assessment method in a Portuguese sample of parents with children assessed through the Transdisciplinary Play-Based Assessment model.

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