title: Assessing acceptance and social skills with peers in childhood. Current issues.
abstract: This article reviews current strategies for assessing social skills with peers in childhood, highlighting contemporary unresolved issues in identifying children who need intervention, selecting target behaviors, and assessing treatment outcome. Sociometric measures of peer acceptance are also considered. Although many current measures of social skills have adequate evidence of reliability and convergent validity, assessment could benefit from (a) increased documentation that the content of measures assesses important skills in relating to peers, (b) improved methods for assessing social behavior in specific interpersonal situations, and (c) more empirical evidence that indirect assessment methods (self-report, peer assessment, and teacher report) and analogue observations reflect in vivo behavior.
authors.affiliation: California School of Professional Psychology, San Diego 92121.
authors.forename: S L
authors.initials: SL
authors.lastname: Foster
authors.forename: H M
authors.initials: HM
authors.lastname: Inderbitzen
authors.forename: D W
authors.initials: DW
authors.lastname: Nangle
mesh_terms: D001521:Behavior Therapy; D002648:Child; D002653:Child Behavior Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000628:therapy; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D010379:Peer Group; D010552:Personality Assessment; D010553:Personality Development; D011594:Psychometrics; D012381:Role Playing; D012917:Social Adjustment; D012919:Social Behavior; D012931:Social Environment