Assessment of Basic Social Skills

California State University, FullertonFollowing recent developments in the measurement of individual differences in nonverbal socialskills, we proposed a conceptual framework for defining and assessing basic social skills. Preliminarytesting resulted in the development of a 105-item, pencil-and-paper measure of seven basic dimen-sions of social skills, called the Social Skills Inventory (SSI). In a series of validation studies usingundergraduate students, the SSI demonstrated convergent and discriminant validity in relation toother measures of nonverbal social skill and traditional personality scales. Scores on the SSI alsopredicted some social group memberships, typical social behaviors, and the depth of social networks.This evidence suggests that the SSI could prove to be a valuable tool for research in personality andsocial psychology and for work in applied settings.In recent years there has been increased attention to denningand assessing individual differences in social abilities and inter-personal skills. Work in this area is progressing on severalfronts. Psychologists have become increasingly concerned withthe assessment and development of social skills for assistingclinical populations (see Curran & Monti, 1982; Trower, Bry-ant, & Argyle, 1978; Wine & Smye, 1981). Personality and so-cial psychologists have developed standardized instruments thatassess dimensions related to interpersonal skill and social effec-tiveness, for example, measures of constructs such as empathy(Hogan, 1969; Mehrabian & Epstein, 1972), shyness, sociabil-ity, (Cheek & Buss, 1981), and self-monitoring (Snyder, 1974,1979). Communication researchers have concerned themselveswith the assessment of communicative competence (Diez,1984;Wiemann, 1977;WiemannB E. L. Thorndike, 1920;R. L. Thorndike, 1936; R. L. Thorndike & Stein, 1937). How-ever, difficulties in assessing social intelligence, particularly theinability to discriminate social intelligence from general intelli-gence, led to the demise of this line of research. It was manyyears later that research on the measurement of social abilitieswas revived with the work of Ouilford and his colleagues onbehavioral intelligence (Guilford, 1967) and the development ofscales to assess empathy (Dymond, 1949; Hogan, 1969). MoreThis research was supported by intramural grants from CaliforniaState University, Fullerton (CSUF) and from a CSUF President's Sum-mer Research Grant.Special thanks go to Barbara Throckmorton, Kathy Lang, and BruceSmith for their tremendous assistance in data collection and to MariaHale, Patti Hopkinson, Larisa Lamb, Mary Lybeck, Kevin McNulty,Mitch Okada, and Debbie White for their help. Chris Cozby, RichardLippa, Keith Widaman, Stan Woll, and Judy Zimmerman made manyhelpful comments and suggestions.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Ron-ald E. Riggio, Department of Psychology, California State University,Fullerton, California 92634.recent are the attempts to measure individual differences innonverbal communication skill (Rosenthal, 1979; see alsoO'Sullivan, 1983, for a historical overview). Although the present research is most closely aligned withthis latest orientation, it is impossible to define social skillswithout incorporating the work of a vast array of social scienceresearchers. There is perhaps no adequate single definition ofsocial skills. The variety and assortment of dimensions labeledas social skills is enormous. Yet there are certain consistenciesin the varying theoretical perspectives. Many social skill re-searchers agree that the basic sending and receiving of informa-tion represent key social skills. Indeed, Hall (1979) divided so-cial communication skills into two broad classes of sending andreceiving. Additional social skills involve cognitive abilitiessuch as interpersonal problem-solving skills and role-playingabilities (Meichenbaum, Butler, & Gruson, 1981). Many existing measures of social skills focus on a single, spe-cific type of skill, skill deficit, or skill-related construct such asassertiveness (Rathus, 1973), nonverbal sensitivity (Rosenthal,Hall, DiMatteo, Rogers, & Archer, 1979), fear of negative evalu-ation (Watson & Friend, 1969), or communication apprehen-sion (McCroskey, 1977). Some instruments that purport tomeasure singular dimensions of social skill may, in fact, be as-sessing constructs that are truly multidimensional; that is, com-prised of more basic independent social skills. Such appears tobe the case with Snyder's Self-Monitoring Scale (SMS, Snyder,1974), which may be composed of three more basic social skills(Briggs , Cheek & Buss 1980 ; Riggio Friedman 1982 seealso Lennox & Wolfe, 1984). Similar multidimensionality mayunderly the constructs of empathy (Davis, 1983) and assertive-ness (Galassi, Galassi, & Vedder, 1981). The presen t study is an attemp to develop general frame-work for several basic dimensions of social skill and to reporton the construction of a self-report assessment tool to measurethese basic skill dimensions. This framework is derived frommultidisciplinary research on social and interpersonal skills,but it springs most directly from the attempts of social personal-ity psychologists to measure individual differences in nonverbalcommunication skills. Most notable of these attempts are thework of Rosenthal and his colleagues (Rosenthal et al., 1979)and Buck (1984) on measuring nonverbal sensitivity, Friedman