Research and Practice in Social- and Life-Skills Training

Abstract

SUMMARY A concern about the development of social and living skills for young people was a part of the very beginnings of residential treatment in the early 1900s and it continued as an important focus in the elaboration of psychodynamic ego psychology in the 1930s. Subsequent to the later emergence and popularity of behavioral and cognitive-behavioral theories and treatment techniques, during the 1980s great interest developed in creating social- and life-skills intervention-training programs for young people displaying impaired interpersonal abilities. This article describes life-skills assessment and training, program effectiveness, and selected model programs. It then reviews some of the currently accepted social-skill assessment techniques and then briefly describes a selected number of commercially published social-skills training programs. Despite the wide range of currently available programs, contemporary research seems to demonstrate that there remain problems in the area of life-skill outcomes, as well as persisting difficulties with the maintenance and generalization of the social skills achieved by the application of didactic training programs. This article suggests that to the extent that both life-skills and social/interpersonal skills may be embedded in or part of broader, more underlying issues of personality functioning, the attempt to teach them as discrete behavioral tasks which can be dichotomized from those deeper issues may be what contributes to some extent to the difficulties of maintenance and generalization of social-skills training.