Psychometric testing methods for children's social skills.

Social skill excesses and deficits have garnered considerable attention from researchers and clinicians over the last three decades. This trend is undoubtedly due to the central role these problems play in psychopathology and the general adjustment of children of all ages. Not surprisingly, these concerns and attention to such problems have also fostered a substantial literature on scaling methods specifically designed to help define and identify social skill deficits as well as track treatment progress. In this paper, for example, we identified 48 scales and related testing methods specifically designed for this purpose. Our goal here was to critically review the psychometric properties and patterns of research with existing social skill tests for children. Current strengths and weaknesses along with future directions for research are considered for this highly researched topic.