Role Playing to Assess Social Competence

Role playing is increasingly being used as a method by which to assess social competence. Role playing has demonstrated its usefulness at reflecting differences between treatment and control groups in studies concerned with the modification of social competence and those attempting to differentiate levels of social competence in known groups. The ability of role plays to accurately represent more naturalistically occurring social behavior is less well established, however. Current evidence suggests that there is only modest correspondence between behavior in role play and naturalistic settings. Further, this correspondence occurs at the molar and not at the molecular behavior level. Additional research is needed to better understand how adequate role plays are at portraying naturally occurring behavior.