Sandy Jackson

The children's social behavior questionnaire for milder variants of PDD problems: Evaluation of the psychometric characteristics

The Childrens Social Behavior Questionnaire (CSBQ) contains items referring to behavior problems seen in children with milder variants of PDD. Data of large samples of children diagnosed as having high-functioning autism, PDDNOS, ADHD, and other child-psychiatric disorders were gathered. Besides the CSBQ, parents completed the Autism Behavior Checklist (ABC) and the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL). The data provided the basis for scale construction of the CSBQ, a comparison of the CSBQ scales with other instruments and a comparison of groups on scores on the CSBQ. The 5 scales obtained referred to Acting-out behaviors, Social Contact problems, Social Insight problems, Anxious/Rigid behaviors and Stereotypical behaviors. Results show that the CSBQ has good psychometric qualities with respect to both reliability and validity. A comparison of the different groups showed that significant group differences were found on all scales. In general, the autism group received the highest scores, followed by the PDDNOS group and the ADHD group. Exceptions were on the Acting-out scale, where the ADHD group scored highest and on the Social Insight scale, where no significant difference was found between the PDDNOS group and the ADHD group. Implications of the results and suggestions for further research are dicussed.

Social Skills Training with Early Adolescents: Effects on Social Skills, Well-being, Self-esteem and Coping.

This study discusses the educational effects of a social skills training on adolescents’ social skills, self-esteem, well-being and coping. A group of 14- to 16-year-old normal adolescents followed a social skills training based on social learning principles. A pre-test — experiment — post-test design was used and the group’s performance was compared with that of a non-intervention control-group. The training was given at school, and the data were collected by means of self-report measures. The results show that the training was successful in several respects: the adolescents’ social anxiety decreased, their social activity increased, their self-esteem improved, and they made more use of adequate coping-strategies. The implications of the results for different sub-groups of adolescents are discussed. Critical attention is also given to two other issues: the type of assessment used and the short-term nature of the evaluation.RésuméCette étude concerne les effets éducatifs d’un entraînement de compétences sociales sur les compétences sociales d’adolescents, leur estime de soi, leur sentiment de bien être et leur “coping”. Des adolescents normaux de 14 à 16 ans ont suivi un entraînement aux compétences basé sur les principes de l’apprentissage social. Dans le cadre d’un paradigme pré-test/entraînement expérimental/post-test, on a comparé les performances du groupe entraîné à celles d’un groupe-contrôle sans intervention. L’entraînement a été effectué à l’école et les données ont été recueillies au moyens de questionnaires sur soi. Les résultats montrent que l’entraînement a eu des effets bénéfiques de différents types: l’anxiété sociale des adolescents a diminué, leur activité sociale a augmenté, leur estime de soi s’est améliorée, et ils utilisent davantage de stratégies d’affrontement adaptées. Les auteurs discutent les implications de leurs résultats pour différents sous groupes d’adolescents. Une attention critique est accordée par ailleurs à deux autres points: le type d’évaluation utilisée et le délai entre l’entraînement et l’évaluation.

Measuring young children's perceptions of support, control, and maintenance in their own social networks

Thirty-eight children (aged 3;7-7;6) and one of their parents took part in a study concerning children perceptions of their social networks. The study made use of a newly developed instrument-the Support, Control and Maintenance Pictures Interview (SCAMPI). The SCAMPI offers an individualized testing environment, employing computer presentation of questions based on photographs of significant persons familiar to the child. SCAMPI is designed to allow data analysis to be carried out with the aid of built-in statistical procedures based on permutation and bootstrap techniques that are optimally adapted to the requirements of individualized testing The study examines the differentiations young children make between persons in their social networks and the functions they fulfil, the level of agreement between children and their parents and the stability of the children responses.

Coping and Self in Adolescence

Coping and developmental tasks on the one hand and identity and self-concept on the other tend to form separate domains of research in (adolescent) psychology. In reviews of coping research, only a few references are made to work carried out in the domain of self-concept (e.g. Compas, 1987; Olbrich, 1984; Seiffge-Krenke, 1986a). Similarly, references from coping research are rarely found in reviews of the self-concept and identity literature (e.g. Marcia, 1980; Markus & Wurf, 1987; Van der Werff, 1985).

Adolescent Identity Development and Social Context: Towards an Integrative Perspective

There appears to be little doubt that a youthful identity is generally regarded as a worthwhile accessory in today’s world. To say this, however, should not be equated with the idea that people wish to be regarded as having adolescent characteristics or an adolescent identity. People seem to have little difficulty in making a clear distinction between particular aspects of self-presentation such as dressing informally, taking an active interest in “young” activities such as sport or being “young at heart” and the typical characteristics of adolescence. There is evidence that parents still experience difficulties in dealing with their adolescent offspring (Noller & Callan, 1991), adolescence is still perceived as an awkward stage of development.

Progress to conservation: Conflict or correct answer?

One of the fundamental problems in socio-cognitive conflict theory concerns what it is that leads to cognitive growth. Is it conflict per se, i.e. the fact that two contradictory opinions are brought together, or is it the presence of the correct answer which is essential for growth. In this experiment, dyads, functioning on the same cognitive level, were formed and asked to solve a conservation-of-length task. The classification of the children in the pre-test was not done according to Piagetian norms, but according to Flavell’s appearance-reality (AR) model: AR non-conservers (AR-NC), AR intermediates (AR-I) and AR conservers (AR-C). Many children who would have been scored as non-conservers in a standard Piagetian task, showed an underlying conservation competence and were classified as AR-I. The results of the interaction suggest that conflict does not lead to appropriate change in AR-NC dyads or AR-I dyads. Furthermore, the results suggest that the most effective method for AR-I to become conservers, is to make them think about a problem and then, to create consensus by confronting the children with others who have also reached the correct solution.