CCF Speaker Series Melanie Dirks Ph.D. 10-24-2014

Incorporating Context into the Measurement of Children’s Social Competence Melanie Dirks, Ph.D. Social competence, or effectiveness in interpersonal interactions, plays a critical role in the maintenance of internalizing and externalizing psychopathology in youth, and is a key target for interventions. For this reason, it is essential that we develop reliable and valid measures of this construct. In this talk, I will discuss on-going work in my lab examining how children report they would respond to peer provocation that suggests that there will be clinical utility associated with measuring social competence (a) with respect to key social situations, and (b) from the perspective of important people in youth’s social environments. Moreover, I will demonstrate that the effectiveness of a given response to peer provocation may depend upon characteristics of the child enacting it. Taken together, these findings highlight the importance of moving away from a “one size fits all” model of social-skills training to a more contextualized approach that considers “what works for whom, and when?”

Melanie Dirks Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, McGill University

10/24/2014 4:00:00 PM