Citation

Gresham FM. Educ. Treat. Child. 1997; 20(3): 233-249.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1997, West Virginia University Press)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Social skills represent a class of behavior that is perhaps the most important and functional for children and youth with emotional and behavior disorders. It could be argued that the inability to build and maintain satisfactory relationships with peer and teachers virtually defines an emotional and behavioral disorder. This necessarily brief and selective article attempts to trace the evolution of the social competence concept from the 1970s to the present. Three definitions were noted in the social skills literature of the 1970s: the peer acceptance definition, the behavioral definition, and the competence-correlates definition.Substantial contributions and sophistication of the social skills concept in the 1980s were made by Hill Walker, Richard McFall, Gary Ladd, Jacqueline Mize, Kenneth Dodge, John Coie, Philip Strain, and Richard Shores, to name a few. Narrative reviews of the effects of social skills training showed that it was effective with a variety of mild disability groups (e.g., behavior disorders, learning disabilities, mild mental retardation). Meta-analyses of the social skills training literature have shown mixed effects depending on the populations studied with effect size estimates ranging from.20 to.50. Four future directions were recommended for the enterprise of social skills training of children with emotional and behavioral disorders: (a) matching social skills interventions with studentsi social skills deficits; (b) establishing the proper context for social skills training; (c) facilitating the functional generalization of trained social skills; and (d) using socially valid outcome measures.

Language: en