Test of Community-based Social Skill Knowledge

The original form of the instrument was developed by Freedman, et al, in order to generically assess various adolescents' social skills. Subsequently, various researchers began using the scale to examine how social skills predicted or were correlated with other social-psychological constructs such as substance abuse or delinquency (Landman, Irvin, & Halpern, 1980; Gaffney & McFall, 1981; Gaffney, 1984). Bullis and Foss (1986), extended the use of the TCSK beyond adolescents and measured the social skills of mildly retarded individuals. As a result of this research, they posited that poor social skills might also predict adult dysfunctions, such as marital difficulties, employment problems, violence, and arrests. However, the TCSK was not designed for adults, and no other then-existing instrument fit the bill. Several years later, Bullis led another research team in the development of such an instrument. However, rather than writing a survey to assess adults, this version wou

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test can sensitize the respondents to the instrument, and cause them to try to remember how they answered before on their retest, resulting in an over-estimation of reliability. Second, the subjects' views may have changed due to some uncontrolled event between the two tests, resulting in substantially different answers and thus an under-estimation of reliability (Smith, p. 47). The internal consistency method of assessing reliability are designed to surmount these problems. In this method, the instrument is administered to the entire group one time, then the instrument is divided into two or more subsets. These items are then measured against one another to determine whether the responses hang together and maintain a consistency of responses (Smith, p. 47). The TCSK was also tested by this measure, called coefficient alpha. Again, the authors did not report the specific statistics of these tests, but report that they fall within the standard of alpha > .75 (Bullis, Bull, Johnson, & Johnson, p. 9). According to Smith, an instrument is said to be valid "when it fully and accurately measures the construct it purports to measure" (p. 48). There are three types of validity. Content validity determines whether an instrument
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1955
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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