Abstract
It is fitting that we begin this volume with an attempt to define social competence. A definition should bring us further toward operationalization and the identification of critical skills to be targeted in assessment and intervention. As it stands, however, there is no agreed upon definition of social competence. Though understandable given the overarching and complex nature of such competence, this lack of agreement has caused problems for both assessment and intervention and has limited the overall utility of the construct. Proposed requisite skills for socially competent responding range from cognitive (e.g., fund of information, skills for processing/acquisition, perspective taking), emotional (e.g., affect regulation), and behavioral (e.g., conversation skills, prosocial behavior) skills and abilities, as well as motivational and expectancy sets (e.g., moral development, self-efficacy; Dubois & Felner, 1996).
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Nangle, D.W., Grover, R.L., Holleb, L.J., Cassano, M., Fales, J. (2010). Defining Competence and Identifying Target Skills. In: Nangle, D., Hansen, D., Erdley, C., Norton, P. (eds) Practitioner's Guide to Empirically Based Measures of Social Skills. ABCT Clinical Assessment Series. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0609-0_1
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