Social Skills Rating System

The Social Skills Rating System (SSRS) provides a broad, multirater assessment of student social behaviors that can affect teacher-student relations, peer acceptance, and academic performance. The SSRS documents the perceived frequency and importance of behaviors influencing a student's development of social competence and adaptive functioning at school and at home. The SSRS components include three behavior rating forms (teacher, parent, and student versions) and an integrative assessment and intervention planning record. Teacher and parent forms are available for three developmental levels: preschool, Grades kindergarten through 6, and Grades 7 through 12. The SSRS assesses the domains of social skills, problem behavior, and academic competence.

The Social Skills Scale has five subscales: Cooperation, Assertion, Responsibility, Empathy, and Self-Control. The Problem Behaviors Scale has three subscales that measure Externalizing Problems, Internalizing Problems, and Hyperactivity. The Academic Competence domain concerns student academic functioning and consists of a small, yet critical, sample of relevant behaviors. Items in this domain are rated on a 5-point scale that corresponds to percentage clusters (1 = lowest 10%,5 = highest 10%). This domain includes items measuring reading and mathematics performance, motivation, parental support, and general cognitive functioning. The scale appears on the teacher form at the elementary and secondary levels.

Scores are based on the results of 3-point ratings on the Social Skills Scale and the Problem Behaviors Scale (0 = never occurs,1 = sometimes occurs, and 2 = very often occurs). All social skills items are rated on two dimensions: frequency and importance. The inclusion of the importance dimension allows raters to specify how important each social skill is for classroom success (teacher ratings), for their child's development (parent ratings), and for the student's relationships with others (student ratings).

The SSRS was standardized on a national sample of 4,170 children and used their self-ratings and ratings of them by 1,027 parents and 259 teachers. Internal consistency estimates for the SSRS across all forms and levels yielded a median coefficient alpha for the Social Skills Scale of .90, .84 for the Problem Behaviors Scale, and .95 for the Academic Competence Scale. Overall, these coefficients indicate a relatively high degree of scale homogeneity. The SSRS manual presents a number of studies investigating the construct, criterion-related, and content validity of the scale. For example, the SSRS Social Skills Scale and subscales correlate highly with other measures of social skills, such as the Walker-McConnell Scale of Social Competence and School Adjustment and the Social Behavior Assessment. The SSRS Problem Behaviors Scale and subscales show moderate to high correlations with the Child Behavior Checklist and the Harter Teacher Rating Scale. In addition, the SSRS Social Skills, Problem Behaviors, and Academic Competence scales reliably differentiate children with mild disabilities (e.g., learning disabilities, behavior disorders, and mild mental or cognitive disabilities) from students without disabilities.

The SSRS has been used in hundreds of studies of children's social behavior. The SSRS has a representative national standardization and extensive evidence for reliability and validity. One of the most attractive features of the SSRS is its utility in selecting target behaviors for intervention purposes, a feature uncommon to most behavior rating scales. An intervention guide that provides a manualized approach to teaching and improving more than 40 social skills coordinates with the SSRS results.

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