Habilidades sociales y contextos de la conducta social

Abstract

Social skills, or interpersonal skills, have been the object of increasing interest over recent years within the field of social, clinical and educational psychology; nevertheless, both their assessment and psychological interventions for their improvement are faced with a disconcerting number of different classifications or divergent categories of said skills. As a result of successive factorial studies, this paper proposes five major categories of social skills (Interaction with strangers in consumer situations, Interactions with people one finds attractive, Interaction with friends and colleagues, Interaction with family members, and Making and rejecting requests to/from friends) which respond to different contexts of social interaction. The five scales (corresponding to said categories) of a new measurement instrument, the Interpersonal Difficulties Questionnaire (IDQ), which has a high level of internal consistency (alpha=0,896), account for 47.47% of the total variance. Correlational analyses between the IDQ and the Social Interaction Self Statement Test (SISST) by Glass, Merluzzi, Biever and Larsen (1982) reveal significant cognitive differences between subjects with high and low levels of social skills, with a greater frequency of positive self statements and a lower frequency of negative self statements being observed in subjects with good social skills, in comparison with those possessing poorer social skills.