Social skills training with young offenders in a borstal: An evaluative study

Abstract

An empirical study of the efficacy of social skills training (SST) with young male offenders in custody was conducted. Two forms of SST, a traditional approach and one with some elements of cognitive behavior modification, were compared with attention‐placebo controls (unstructured discussion), a no‐training group drawn from those judged suitable for SST, and an unreferred control group drawn from the remainder of the borstal population. A variety of pre‐ and post‐training measures were taken, including a wide range of personality measures, staff ratings of institutional behavior, frequency of institutional discipline reports, and ratings of role‐play performance. The two behavioral training groups improved significantly on the behavioral role‐play assessment, while the controls did not. Institutional discipline reports also improved for the two behavioral training groups, although a similar improvement also was found for the attention‐placebo controls. No other measures differentiated between the experimental groups; nor could any distinctions be drawn between the two forms of behavioral training on any measures. It is suggested that the improvement in behavioral ratings may have been a function of familiarity with role‐play, and, therefore, the only positive training effect — improvement in institutional discipline — can be attributed to an attention component. A number of explanations are offered for the lack of generalization of the training effects: It is further suggested that the cognitive training may have been particularly sensitive to a number of inhibiting factors. Finally, several suggestions for future experimentation and training strategies are made.