Social Skills Training: Should We Raze, Remodel, or Rebuild?

Abstract

The degree to which children and youth establish and maintain satisfactory interpersonal relationships with peers and teachers is the defining feature of social competence. Difficulties in social competence play a substantial role in social, psychological, and educational adjustment and often serve as the basis for intervention and remediation strategies. This article reviews past and present conceptualizations and summarizes narrative and meta-analytic reviews of social skills training (SST) outcome studies. Overall, modest effect sizes are reported in the meta-analytic literature (M = .35) suggesting that SST is a relatively weak intervention strategy, leading to only a 14% improvement in social functioning over chance (64% versus 50%). Three recommendations are offered as a blueprint for rebuilding SST: (1) improving assessment by considering the social validity and sensitivity of outcome measures; (2) matching social skills intervention strategies to specific social skills deficits; and (3) programming for functional rather than topographical generalization by adopting a contextual approach to teaching social behavior within a competing behaviors framework.