Measuring social skills of children and adolescents in a Chinese population: Preliminary evidence on the reliability and validity of the translated Chinese version of the Social Skills Improvement System-Rating Scales (SSIS-RS-C).
The Chinese SSIS-RS is ready for Hong Kong BCBAs to screen social-skill gaps in students aged 5-18.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Costa et al. (2017) translated the Social Skills Improvement System-Rating Scales into Chinese. They gave the new form to Hong Kong students aged 5-18, with and without developmental delay. The team then checked if scores stayed steady and if kids with known problems scored lower, as expected.
What they found
The Chinese version held together. Internal consistency was good, so items hung together. Students with delays earned lower social-skill scores than peers, giving early proof the tool can flag who needs help.
How this fits with other research
Giné et al. (2017) and Patton et al. (2020) did the same job for Catalan and Icelandic support-need scales. All three papers show translated child measures can keep their psychometric muscle when teams follow careful back-translation steps. Chan et al. (2017) looked at 22,871 Japanese children and found social-communication problems sit on one smooth continuum. That large survey warns us not to treat any scale score as a hard cut-off; instead, use the SSIS-RS-C number as a gradient that guides next steps. Andrés-Roqueta et al. (2016) add urgency: kids with language impairment were disliked more often, and weak social cognition explained extra variance beyond language. Their negative outcome underlines why we need quick, reliable social-skill screens like the SSIS-RS-C in the first place.
Why it matters
If you work with Cantonese-speaking children, you now have a validated social-skills ruler. Use it during intake to spot mild versus urgent cases, then re-check every six months to see if your intervention is moving the needle. The scale also gives you parent and teacher forms, so you can trianguate and write goals that travel across settings.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The Social Skills Improvement System-Rating Scales (SSIS-RS; Gresham & Elliott, 2008) are designed to assist in the screening and classification of students (aged 5-18 years) who are suspected of presenting with social skills deficits and to offer guidelines in the development of interventions to remediate those types of problems. The objective of this study is to examine the preliminary reliability and validity of the translated Chinese version of the SSIS-RS, referred to as the SSIS-RS-C. In this study, parent-reported social skills and problem behaviors among students with typical development (n=79) were compared with those of age- and gender-matched students with a known developmental disability (n=79) using the SSIS-RS-C. The results indicated that the SSIS-RS-C subscale scores in all the disability groups were significantly different except for those in the Assertion scale for one disability group. Furthermore, the normative sample of typically developing children and adolescents (aged 5-12 and 13-18 years, n=567) from Hong Kong was established to improve the psychometric properties of the SSIS-RS-C. There were moderate to strong relationships between the common subscales across all forms of the SSIS-RS-C. Acceptable to excellent levels of internal consistency across all common subscales was also obtained. The scores for the Hong Kong sample (n=567) derived from the use of the SSIS-RS-C were then compared to the normative sample scores from the American version of the SSIS-RS. It was found that there were statistically significant differences on five out of the seven SSIS-RS-C Social Skill subscales for children aged 5-12 years and on four out of the seven SSIS-RS-C Social Skills subscales for the adolescent group (aged 13-18 years). Also, there were statistically significant differences between the American and Hong Kong samples on all of the SSIS-RS-C Problem Behavior scale scores. It was concluded that the SSIS-RS-C is a promising instrument for clinicians to be able to differentiate social skills and problem behaviors among students presenting with and without developmental disabilities in Hong Kong contexts.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2017 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2016.11.019