Assessing Acceptance and Social Skills with Peers in Childhood

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.