Validation of social skills of adolescent males in an interview conversation with a previously unknown adult.
Eye contact and starting talk are the only teen social skills that predict adult judgments of friendliness, skill, and job readiness.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers watched 16 teenage boys talk with an adult they had never met.
The boys were juvenile offenders in a residential program.
Staff scored each boy on eye contact, smiles, posture, and how often he spoke first.
Four adults who did not know the boys later rated the same conversation.
They judged how friendly, skilled, nervous, and hirable each boy seemed.
What they found
Only two behaviors predicted every adult rating: eye contact and starting talk.
More eye contact and more verbal initiations meant higher friendliness, skill, and job-hire scores.
Other moves, like smiling or sitting up straight, only helped with one or two ratings.
How this fits with other research
Varley et al. (1980) showed that practice, modeling, and feedback can teach interview skills to adults with intellectual disability. Their work came first and focused on training, while Tager-Flusberg (1981) shows which exact behaviors adults notice.
Wolchik et al. (1982) later used the same idea with university students. They proved that trained interview skills last four months, backing up the value of eye contact and clear speech found here.
Murphy et al. (2014) created a parent-and-teacher checklist for autistic youth. Their paper swaps live adult ratings for questionnaires, but both studies chase the same goal: finding quick, valid ways to measure social skill.
Why it matters
If you run social-skills groups for teens, drill eye contact and starting talk first. These two moves alone change how strangers see friendliness and hire potential. You can skip long lessons on smiles or posture until the basics are solid. Track eye contact with a simple tally during role play; when it rises, adult ratings will likely rise too.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Seventy convicted young male offenders were videotaped during a 5-min standardized interview with a previously unknown adult. In order to determine the social validity of the behavioral components of social interaction for this population, measures of 13 behaviors were obtained from the tapes. These measures were then correlated with ratings of friendliness, social anxiety, social skills performance, and employability made by four independent adult judges from the same tapes. It was found that measures of eye contact and verbal initiations were correlated significantly with all four criterion rating scales. The frequencies of smiling and speech dysfluencies were both significantly correlated with ratings of friendliness and employability. The amount spoken was found to be a significant predictor of social skills performance whereas the frequency of head movements influenced judgments of social anxiety. The latency of response was negatively correlated with social skills and employability ratings and the frequency of question-asking and interruptions correlated significantly with friendliness, social skills, and employability ratings. Finally, the levels of gestures, gross body movements, and attention feedback responses were not found to influence judgments on any of the criterion scales. The implications of the study for selection of targets for social skills training for adolescent male offenders are discussed.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1981 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1981.14-159