Abstract
Torres, J., Saldana, D, & Rodriguez-Ortiz, I. R. (2016). Social information processing in deaf adolescents. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 21, 326–338.
Many students exhibit difficulties with social skills. Relatively few tools are available for assessing social skills. Current practice often involves questionnaires or observation protocols. Parents, teachers, and/or clinicians may use questionnaires to rate student behaviors across known communicative contexts and interactants, for example, Children’s Communication Checklist CCC-2 (Bishop, 2003), the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals–Fourth Edition Pragmatics Profile (Semel, Wiig, & Secord, 2003), and Pragmatic Language Observation Scale (Newcomer & Hammill, 2009). For tools such as the Targeted Observation of Pragmatics in Children’s Conversation (TOPICC; Adams, Lockton, Gaile, & Freed, 2011) or Pragmatics Observational Measure (POM; Cordier, Munroc, Wilkes-Gillan, Speyer, & Pearce, 2014), the clinician observes the student during a structured interview or in an activity with peers, rating behaviors such as giving too much or too little information, difficulty responding to questions, initiating or maintaining topics. A number of informal and formal assessments are available for evaluating students’ ToM understanding which is critical for appropriate and effective social interactions (e.g., see tools on the Autism Research Centre site [https://www.autismresearchcentre.com/arc_tests] or The Theory of Mind Task Battery; Hutchins, Prelock, & Bouyea, 2016). Each of these tools evaluate elements important in social interactions, but they do not evaluate students’ understanding of how to engage in all the behaviors essential for social problem solving.
Social problem solving requires that people process information in social situations. How persons process information in social situations is related to their past experiences and how they filter the information in the situations. Social competence is linked to social information processing (SIP). The most extensively used and validated model of SIP is the six-stage model of Crick and Dodge (1994). The general idea underlying this model is that people understand and interpret social situations differently. It posits that when people deal with a social situation, they take six mental sequential steps. Effective processing at each step determines a socially competent behavior, whereas erroneous or biased processing leads to the production of a socially maladaptive behavior. Also, each step is considered necessary but insufficient by itself to respond adequately and effectively; the steps are interrelated. According to this model, children approach a social situation with a set of skills and memories of previous experiences. The relationship between these and the steps in SIP is reciprocal. Thus, children who have limited experiences and skills in social situations tend to have poorer SIP, which in turn affects their social interaction negatively. Children who process information in a social situation with a hostile bias tend to show less adaptive or problematic behaviors.
These are the components of the Crick and Dodge SIP model:
Step 1: Encoding of social cues. People focus their attention on and encode certain external and internal elements of information present in the social situation.
Step 2: Interpretation of social cues. From the relevant social cues, they construct a mental representation of the situation.
Step 3: Goal formulation. People establish their own goals in that situation.
Step 4: Access to or generation of responses. People access one or more responses stored in their memory, or if the situation is novel, they generate one or various new responses to that situation.
Step 5: Response decision. They assess the possible responses as a function of their appropriateness and the expected results, and choose the one they think is the most favorable.
Step 6: Representation. They carry out the selected response.
A Social Problem Solving Assessment Tool
The authors of this article developed an assessment task to evaluate students’ understanding of each component of the SIP model and gain information of how they would likely respond in social problem solving situations. The test consists of a structured interview after students have viewed short scenes of social situations. Adolescents (ages 13 to 20 years) watch the scene of a social situation lasting from 30 s to 2 min, and then are requested to imagine that they were the protagonist of this story and to answer a series of questions that corresponded to the six steps of the Crick and Dodge (1994) model.
The videos showed two types of social situations (participation in the peer group and provocation by peers) that introduced main characters with three types of intentions (benign, ambiguous, and hostile). Every scene was accompanied by three possible response strategies to the situation: competent, aggressive, and inept, presented randomly. Table 1 shows examples of some of the scenes.
Examples of Social Problem Solving Situations
After the viewing of each scene, students were engaged in interviews that addressed each component of the SIP model.
Competent goals in participation scenes: requesting or being invited to play, making an assertive statement about the other individual’s responses, or saying that the others are sorry Competent goals in provocation scenes: asking the other boy/girl to apologize, making an assertive statement, or asking why the other boy/girl behaved the way he or she did were classified as competent goals. Aggressive/inept goals: For both participation and provocation scenes: responses involving aggression or rejection by peers were considered aggressive goals, and responses involving distancing or leaving the situation, crying, or shrugging and not doing anything were considered inept goals.
Participation scenes: the interviewer presented one of three possible alternatives, based on the intention of the characters of the scenes: “Let’s imagine that it is difficult to know for sure whether these boys/girls want to play with him or her” (ambiguous), “Let’s imagine that the other boys/girls don’t want to play with him or her” (hostile), or “Let’s imagine that the other boys/girls want to play with him or her” (benign). Provocation scenes: the interviewer gave one of three possible instructions: “Imagine that it’s hard to know for sure whether the boy/girl is doing it on purpose” (ambiguous), “Imagine that the other boy/girl is doing it on purpose” (hostile), or “Imagine that the other boy/girl is not doing it deliberately” (benign). Students were asked, “What would you say or do if this happened to you?” Responses were classified as competent, aggressive, inept, or irrelevant.
Participants viewed videos showing three possible response strategies (competent, aggressive, and inept) to the scene. Participants were asked to judge them on various dimensions, with three questions that followed each response strategy: Interpersonal affiliation of the response: “Would the other boy/boys (girl/girls) like you to do or say that?” Instrumental result of the response: “Is this response effective to achieve the desired result?” (in the participation situations) or “Is this a good response?” (in the provocation scenes). Participants’ confidence in the response representation (self-efficacy): “Could you behave the same way?”
Students were asked to represent a competent response to each situation. “Let’s imagine that you’re the boy/girl in the story. Now I want you to represent an appropriate response to the situation.” Responses were coded according to the following scale: 3 points for very competent responses, both in content and in form (eye contact, facial expression, and body posture); 2 points for appropriate responses, both in content and in form; 1 point for responses lacking appropriate content or form; 0 points for no response or very incompetent responses (both in form and content). Students’ scores on the SIP task correlated with their scores on a social competence questionnaire completed by their teachers.
SIP With Adolescents With Disabilities
The SIP has been used with deaf adolescents with severe to profound hearing loss wearing CIs or hearing aids and matched hearing adolescents. The deaf adolescents had significantly lower scores on all six components of the SIP. Furthermore, they made twice as many hostile attributions in ambiguous and benign situations than their hearing peers. Deaf adolescent exhibited particular difficulty with Step 2: Interpretation. They were likely to fail to adequately decode cues in a social situation or misinterpret the intentions of others. In Step 3: Goal Formation, they formulated fewer relevant goals and had a greater tendency to propose hostile (revenge), inept, and irrelevant goals in social situations. They also generated fewer competent strategies and more aggressive, inept, and irrelevant strategies as possible responses to the situation (fourth step). In the response decision step (fifth step), deaf adolescents evaluated probable interpersonal outcomes of aggression more positively than their hearing counterparts. In Step 6, they suggested poorer social responses. Analyses of the students’ responses to each step of the SIP can provide information for design interventions or support systems for deaf adolescents.
The SIP tool provides a means of evaluating the many components essential for social problem solving. Although SLPs and educators do not have access to the videos the researchers employed in this study, they could design their own SIP tasks using movie clips available on the Internet to assess student’s understanding and use of each step in social problem solving.