Preschoolers’ Social Skills: Advances in Assessment for Intervention Using Social Behavior Ratings

Abstract

Social skills play an important role in young children's successes in and outside of school. For two decades, educators have used the Social Skills Rating System (SSRS; Gresham & Elliott, 1990) as a tool for describing children's social behaviors and for planning interventions to improve social skills. Although widely used, some researchers have criticized certain aspects of the preschool version of the SSRS. In 2008, a revision of the instrument, the Social Skills Improvement System-Rating Scales (SSiS-RS; Gresham & Elliott), was published. In this article, we examine the development of the preschool versions of SSRS and SSiS-RS and provide a comparison of the two rating systems, focusing on the content, structure, psychometric properties, and intended use of the instruments. We then describe the SSiS-RS within an assessment for intervention model. We conclude that the SSiS-RS is an improved assessment instrument over the preschool SSRS and provide recommendations for future studies that will contribute to the evolving validity evidence for the resulting scores and decisions made from them.

Validation of the Peer Social Maturity Scale for Assessing Children's Social Skills

“…The SSRS social skills scale has an excellent internal consistency, with a correlation alpha of around 0.94 (Gresham, Elliott, Vance, & Cook, ). It has excellent validity as assessed with concurrent and longitudinal associations to child behaviour in the classroom and factor analysis of the instrument's internal structure (Frey, Elliot, & Gresham, ). Over the last decade, the SSRS has been widely used in research, and as a screening tool in educational and clinical contexts (Gresham et al, ).…”

A validation of the Social Skills domain of the Social Skills Improvement System‐Rating Scales with Chinese preschoolers

“…There are different kinds of methods to assess preschool children’s social skills, such as conducting experimental assessment of social behaviors in the laboratory (Iannotti, ), collecting information about children’s social behaviors through parents’ or teachers’ reports (Coolahan, Fantuzzo, Mendez, & McDermott, ; LaFreniere & Dumas, ), and observations of social skills within social situations. Among these approaches, behavior rating is the most widely used method to rate children’s social skills (Frey et al, ; F. M. Gresham, Elliott, Cook, Vance, & Kettler, ). Behavior rating approach for measuring children’s social behaviors allows for the assessment of a broad range of the child’s behaviors by different raters (e.g., teachers and parents), therefore, offering a more comprehensive picture of a child’s behaviors in more than one setting from different perspectives.…”

Comparability of the Social Skills Improvement System to the Social Skills Rating System: A Norwegian Study

“…The SSRS is among the most frequently used instruments for measuring children's (age 3-18 years) pro-social behavior and problem behavior, and a number of studies have supported its validity and reliability (Frey, Elliott, & Gresham, 2011;Gresham & Elliot, 1990Humphrey et al, 2011;Walthall, Konold, & Pianta, 2005). Recently the SSIS-RS was compared to the SSRS (Gresham, Elliott, Vance, & Cook, 2011), and good agreement was observed on common subscales.…”