Evaluating the Psychometric Quality of Social Skills Measures: A Systematic Review

Introduction - Impairments in social functioning are associated with an array of adverse outcomes. Social skills measures are commonly used by health professionals to assess and plan the treatment of social skills difficulties. There is a need to comprehensively evaluate the quality of psychometric properties reported across these measures to guide assessment and treatment planning. Objective - To conduct a systematic review of the literature on the psychometric properties of social skills and behaviours measures for both children and adults. Methods - A systematic search was performed using four electronic databases: CINAHL, PsycINFO, Embase and Pubmed; the Health and Psychosocial Instruments database; and grey literature using PsycExtra and Google Scholar. The psychometric properties of the social skills measures were evaluated against the COSMIN taxonomy of measurement properties using pre-set psychometric criteria. Results - Thirty-Six studies and nine manuals were included to assess the psychometric properties of thirteen social skills measures that met the inclusion criteria. Most measures obtained excellent overall methodological quality scores for internal consistency and reliability. However, eight measures did not report measurement error, nine measures did not report cross-cultural validity and eleven measures did not report criterion validity. Conclusions - The overall quality of the psychometric properties of most measures was satisfactory. The SSBS-2, HCSBS and PKBS-2 were the three measures with the most robust evidence of sound psychometric quality in at least seven of the eight psychometric properties that were appraised. A universal working definition of social functioning as an overarching construct is recommended. There is a need for ongoing research in the area of the psychometric properties of social skills and behaviours instruments

Exploring the Application of Social Robots in Understanding Bullying Perpetrators

Part 10: Interactive PostersInternational audienceThis paper examines a novel approach to the problem of bullying by employing Child-Robot Interaction to attempt to understand the causes of perpetrators behaviour. A comparative study was undertaken to understand the efficacy of such an approach. Children aged 9–10 years were first identified on the basis of their bullying perpetration record and characteristics. Half the children were made to interact individually with a social robot and the other half with a human agent over the span of 3 weeks. Our results exhibit that while children opened up to both kinds of agents, interaction with the human agent led to more insightful conversations that enhanced understanding of causes for the perpetrator’s behaviour. As expected, the interactions varied from child to child and are to be considered on an individual basis. This is an ongoing study and shall be later extended to employ a hybrid of a within-subject and an in-between subject approach in order to examine the experience of each child individually and holistically

Development of the Bullying and Health Experiences Scale

BACKGROUND: Until recently, researchers have studied forms of bullying separately. For 40 years, research has looked at the traditional forms of bullying, including physical (eg, hitting), verbal (eg, threats), and social (eg, exclusion). Attention focused on cyberbullying in the early 2000s. Although accumulating research suggests that bullying has multiple negative effects for children who are targeted, these effects excluded cyberbullying from the definition of bullying. OBJECTIVE: This paper responds to the need for a multidimensional measure of the impact of various forms of bullying. We used a comprehensive definition of bullying, which includes all of its forms, to identify children who had been targeted or who had participated in bullying. We then examined various ways in which they were impacted. METHODS: We used an online method to administer 37 impact items to 377 (277 female, 100 male) children and youth, to develop and test the Bullying and Health Experience Scale. RESULTS: A principal components analysis of the bullying impact items with varimax rotation resulted in 8 factors with eigenvalues greater than one, explaining 68.0% of the variance. These scales include risk, relationships, anger, physical injury, drug use, anxiety, self-esteem, and eating problems, which represent many of the cognitive, psychological, and behavioral consequences of bullying. The Cronbach alpha coefficients for the 8 scales range from .73 to .90, indicating good inter-item consistency. Comparisons between the groups showed that children involved in bullying had significantly higher negative outcomes on all scales than children not involved in bullying. CONCLUSIONS: The high Cronbach alpha values indicate that the 8 impact scales provide reliable scores. In addition, comparisons between the groups indicate that the 8 scales provide accurate scores, with more negative outcomes reported by children involved in bullying compared to those who are not involved in bullying. This evidence of reliability and validity indicates that these scales are useful for research and clinical purposes to measure the multidimensional experiences of children who bully and are bullied

'Were you cyberbullied? Let me help you.' : studying adolescents’ online peer support of cyberbullying victims using thematic analysis of online support group fora

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe