Learning Patterns in Social Skills Training Programs: An Exploratory Study
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Learning Patterns in Social Skills Training Programs: An Exploratory Study Sasha Preece Æ David Mellor
Published online: 13 September 2008 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2008
Abstract While Social Skills Training programs have been shown to improve the social skills of children with Disruptive Behaviour Disorders, the pattern of change in the participants’ learning during the training period remains unknown. Identifying this pattern could assist in determining whether more or less training hours are required to maximize the benefits of such programs within available resources. The current study aimed to replicate the social skills improvements found in previous research, and to explore the pattern of improvements in social knowledge and social performance that occurs during a Social Skills Training program. Two groups of eight males with behavioural problems attended 14 one-hour sessions of Social Skills Training. Multisources, multisettings and multimethods were used to measure social knowledge and social performance across five test phases. Multivariate analyses did not support previous findings showing overall improvements in social knowledge and social performance. Patterns of learning were not found to be consistent across different measures. Keywords
Externalizing disorders Sessions Social skills training programs
The benefits of social skills training programs for children with Disruptive Behaviour Disorders such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Conduct Disorder, and Oppositional Defiant Disorder have been consistently demonstrated over the last two decades (e.g. Biermann 1986; Pfiffner and McBurnett 1997; Webster-Stratton et al. 2001). However, few studies have gathered assessment information beyond pre and post measures for a single social skills training program. While using pre and post measures enables the researcher to determine overall whether the program was of any benefit to the participants, the pattern of S. Preece D. Mellor (&) School of Psychology, Deakin University, Burwood 3125, Australia e-mail: [email protected]
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change in the participants’ learning during the training period remains unknown. On the one hand, it may be that participants show a gradual pattern of learning across the training period, suggesting that continued training may further benefit the participants’ social skills. On the other hand, the pattern could show an increase in learning followed by a plateau, which may suggest that the latter sessions have little impact on participants’ social skills, and that the programs are unnecessarily long. Thus, measuring the pattern of change in participants’ levels of social performance and social knowledge during the treatment phase, to establish what is otherwise known as the ‘‘dose-response curve’’, could inform on how much social skills training is required to produce optimal learning for program participants. In addition to the lack of dose–response studies, there has been scant research to date questioning whether impr
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