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Research and Practice in Social- and Life-Skills Training
D. Patrick Zimmerman, PsyD
SUMMARY. A concern about the development of social and living skills for young people was a part of the very beginnings of residential treatment in the early 1900s and it continued as an important focus in the elaboration of psychodynamic ego psychology in the 1930s. Subsequent to the later emergence and popularity ofbehavioral and cognitive-behavioral theories and treatment techniques, during the 1980s great interest developed in creating social- and life-skills intervention-training programs for young people displaying impaired interpersonal abilities. This article describes life-skills assessment and training, program effectiveness, and selected model programs. It then reviews some of the currently accepted social-skill assessment techniques and then briefly describes a selected number of commercially published social-skills training programs.
Despite the wide range of currently available programs, contemporary research seems to demonstrate that there remain problems in the area of life-skill outcomes, as well as persisting difficulties with the maintenance and generalization of the social skills achieved by the application of didactic training programs. This article suggests that to the extent that both life-skills and social/interpersonal skills may be embedded in or part of broader, more underlying issues of personality functioning, the attempt to teach them as discrete behavioral tasks which can be dichotomized from those deeper issues may be what contributes to some extent to the difficulties of maintenance and generalization of social-skills training.
[Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <[email protected]> Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.com.> © 2002 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]KEYWORDS. Social skills, life skills, training programs
INTRODUCTION
In his recent brief paper on the issue of âreinventing residential childcareâ in the United States, James Whittaker (2000) noted that residential care continues to be viewed more as part of the problem in sevices to young people, rather than as part of the solution. Among the variety of reasons that he cites, some of the difficulties include: the lack of clear diagnostic indicators for residential placement; a presumption of âintrusivenessâ and concerns about attachment for children placed; questionable effectiveness of residential treatment; a lack of consensus on the more important intervention components; a lack of residential treatment theory development in recent years; and a continuing familial bias in service selection. Later in his paper, Whittaker cites a number of characteristics that a recent report of the U. S. Government Accounting Office (1994) identified as appearing to be related to treatment success in group care. While two crucial ingredients were family involvement and the development of adequate post-care community supports, the findings also included the importance of teaching social, coping, and living skills as a part of the overall residential treatment experience. This paper will focus upon the issue of living skills, and especially upon social-skills training, which may be argued to serve as the building blocks for successfully teaching life skills that enable young people to successfully take advantage of transitional and post-program living options.
EARLY HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
Although much of the contemporary writings about the implementation of social skills training is based upon behavioral and cognitive-behavioral theories about treatment, it might be argued that one can actually find references to concerns about such issues in the writings of some of the early founders of residential treatment for young people. There have been many threads in the historical development of the concept of group care in the United States, but one of the clearest and most direct lines of theory contribution leads back to August Aichhornâs organization of an institution for delinquent boys in Oberhollabrunn, Austria, in 1917 (Zimmerman & Cohler, 1998). His book, Wayward Youth (1925/1965), reported on a touching experiment in mental health work with adolescents, his attempts to develop and provide psychological treatment for delinquent young people as an alternative to the punitive atmosphere of threats, punishment, flogging and segregation typical of the existing reformatories of that time. Out of the shambles of a former refugee camp, Aichhorn immersed himself in creating a more benign treatment environment for incorrigible young people, adapting Freudâs theories and techniques to his own rehabilitative efforts aimed at understanding and influencing the personality structures of delinquents.
Aichhornâs therapeutic work with delinquents included: (1) the application of Freudian psychoanalytic classical drive theory to reconstructively understand delinquent symptoms; (2) a belief in the critical influence of early personal attachment difficulties (especially regarding the mother) in the later development of delinquent symptoms; (3) the prescription of specific therapeutic techniques, especially emphasizing the promotion and use of the positive transference, within a total, planned environment; and (4) a belief in the significance of the peer group as a means of facilitating individual psychological development. In addition to those more widely known aspects of his treatment philosophy, one can find early references to the potentially beneficial effects of attention to the development of personally fulfilling social and life skills for the charges under his care. For example, in Wayward Youth (1925/1965), Aichhorn provided anecdotal case descriptions of how even limited vocational experiences within his residential setting provided important and lasting opportunities for the sublimation of issues such as anti-social grandiosity and personal identity confusion displayed by two young men under his care.
In 1940, as the first Nazi bombing of London was initiated, Anna Freud became concerned for both the physical safety and psychological security of young children exposed to this senseless violence. She mobilized efforts to develop a temporary shelter for these children, which was soon replaced by a more ambitious scheme involving more comprehensive residence programs (Cohler & Zimmerman, 1997). The philosophy underlying the work of the war nurseries was founded largely on the earlier work of Aichhorn. Prior to her monthly reports on work in the war nurseries, Miss Freudâs seminal earlier work (1936/1966) had focused upon the ego and its mechanisms of defense. That contribution portrayed the structure of the ego as a psychological apparatus âat warâ with the id; it was seen as a center of continual conflict between the drives and the demands of reality and the conscience.
Her friend Heinz Hartmann subsequently shifted the focus from the ego as an agency of conflict to a psychic mechanism of positive adaptation to the social world, and he particularly described a number of âconflict-freeâ functions of the ego (1939/1958). These âconflict freeâ functions of the ego included: perception, motivation, object comprehension, thinking, language, memory, productivity, the maturation of motor development, and the learning processes inherent in the acquisition of those skills. Seen otherwise, Hartmannâs work represented a shift from Anna Freudâs emphasis upon the psychological defenses, to the elaboration of a broad range of adaptive developmental and social/life skills. A somewhat later elaboration (White & Gilliland, 1975) of the major functions said to comprise the psychological agency often designated as the ego included: perception, consciousness, memory, attention, thought, intelligence, speech/ language, motor skills, judgment/foresight, delay of needs and impulses, defenses, and signal affects/emotions (anxiety, depression, shame and guilt). The main reason for enumerating those functions is, once again, to indicate the similarity and relevance of those âegoâ capacities to some of our current ideas about âlife and social skills.â
Turning to a different thread in the development of early ideas about life and social skills, among the most significant contributions of the social sciences to the study of personal development has been a focus on the meanings that are made of oneâs environment or of the total âlife surround.â The social psychologist Kurt Lewin (1943, 1944) referred to this totality of experience as the âlife-space,â noting that particular behavior is a function of both the person and his/her psychologically relevant environment. All aspects of intention and action are governed by the meanings with which the child endows the psychologically relevant field experienced at a particular time. As Lewin (1943) observed, âAny behavior or any other change in a psychological field depends ⊠upon the psychological field at that timeâ(p. 45). While the past as presently experienced is a critically important determinant of this present experience of the life-space, focus is on the experience of this life-space as the present psychologically meaningful determinant of intention and action.
Much of Lewinâs pioneering work led to contemporary social psychology and to the study of collective behavior; his contributions have had different important contributions in the field of psychology. First, as interpreted by Redl and Winemanâs writings on group care (1951, 1952), the focus on the personally significant life-space, and the interplay of life space and group process, provided a model for realizing change among troubled young people unable to live with others and experiencing personal disorganization. Redl and Wineman emphasized Lewinâs concept of life-space in their effort to intervene in the lives of troubled children, blending the insights gained from Lewinâs portrayal of the experience of self and others within group and society with the emerging theories of ego psychology during the post-war period, in the construction of a childrensâ center which would foster enhanced ego control among children whose egos were unable to perform as a consequence of early life experiences of poverty and both social and family disorganization.
Their work at Pioneer House in Detroit, Michigan, sought to integrate the classical drive-oriented perspective on work with delinquent children first formulated by Aichhorn (1925), the tradition of psychoanalytic ego psychology and education initiated by Anna Freud and Heinz Hartmann, as well as the social psychology insights realized from the studies by Lewin and his colleagues. Indeed, Redl and Wineman (1951) began their first book with an explicit acknowledgement to Aichhorn, a statement of the direct lineage of their thinking to this signal figure in psychoanalysis, who was among the first to apply a psychoanalytic understanding of motivation to education and the first to attempt to understand delinquency in the same terms as neurotic symptoms. While Redl and Wineman are perhaps best known for their attempts to develop specific strategies for child care workers to deal with the difficulties of working with aggressive, delinquent young people, those strategies can also be understood as attempts to enhance the âego strengthsâ of those children or, said otherwise, to develop social awareness and increased social coping and life skills.
CURRENT FINDINGS ON THE STATUSOF LIFE-SKILLS TRAINING
Difficulties Experienced by Young Persons Leaving Alternate Care
Barth (1993) noted that life-skills training has been one of the latest additions to the scenery of school districts across the United States, as part of a greater concern about the human condition of their students. The issue is of even greater importance for youth who are leaving different out-of-home care settings, especially residential treatment. For example, the 1990 Westat study (Cook, 1990) found that only 44 percent of the 18-year-olds discharged from out-of-home care had completed high school at the time of discharge to independence. Further, only 39 percent had any job experience, 38 percent had been clinically diagnosed as emotionally disturbed, 58 percent had three or more different living placements prior to discharge and 29 percent reported drug abuse or alcohol problems. The 1992 National Association of Social Worker survey (Bass, 1992) of runaway and homeless young persons documented the same kind of difficulties by adolescents served in emergency shelters: 53 percent had educational problems, 26 percent had a mental health problem, 20 percent had attempted suicide, 23 percent had abused drugs, 19 percent had abused alcohol and 39 percent had no means of financial support.
Lindsey and Ahmedâs (1999) review of follow-up studies of former foster wards presents similar results, concluding that these young people were likely to have serious educational deficits, to be unemployed or employed in low-paying jobs, to have difficulties in securing satisfactory housing, and to be in receipt of some form of public assistance. Despite the alarming numbers noted above, the 1988 Westat study of young persons leaving out-of-home care found that 68 percent had not received services in money management/consumer awareness, 69 percent had received no training in decision making/problem solving skills, 71 percent had received no services in the area of food management, 71 percent had received no assistance in the knowledge of community resources, 76 percent had received no services in post-discharge housing skills, and 82 percent had received no documented training related to emergency/safety skills. Given that this national survey is over ten years old, one might have justifiable concerns about how much this situation has improved since that time.
On the other hand, with the impetus of some increased federal and state funding for transitional services, a number of programs have been developed at the state and local levels, which offer a number of services focussing upon a myriad of life-skills training components. Most of these programs dichotomously divide the training skills into hard, tangible, or resource life skills versus soft, intangible, or functional life skills (Cook & Ansell, 1986; Hahn, 1994; Nollan, Wolf, Ansell, Burns, Barr, Copeland, & Paddock, 2000). The former tend to be defined as skills that the young person must know or do to meet specific independent living needs such as employment, housing, money management, resources for leisure and recreation, transportation knowledge and home management. The latter focus more upon the individualâs development of self-esteem and other personality attributes such as cognitive problem-solving skills, communication skills, anger management, and social skills.
In terms of the actual delivery of life-skills, Ansell (2001) has presented an instructional model pictured as a four-stage independent living continuum. Phase 1 involves âInformalâ exposure to life skills, through mentoring, informal group discussions, helping with group activities and work shadowing. Phase 2, âFormalâ activities, includes one-to-one and group life-skills teaching and activities, as well as field trips and service projects. Phase 3 involves âSupervised Independent Livingâ programs, with supervised apartments and other transitional living arrangements. The final stage, Phase 4, is the stage of âSelf-Sufficiency,â and involves the use of support groups, counseling, and the active provision of information and referral services. Ansell states that during the past ten years, most of the life-skills work has been done in Phase 2 (âFormal Learningâ) on the continuum, but that the area in which we can expect the most development in the near future is in Phase 3, âSupervised Independent Living.â
Effectiveness of Life-Skills Training
Despite the efforts to increase services to provide life-skills training, questions remain about the effectiveness of these services. In one effort to evaluate the need for life-skills training, Mech, Ludy-Dobson, and Hulseman (1994) surveyed the levels of life-skill knowledge for youth living in different out-of-home settings. Their findings revealed higher life-skills mean score knowledge levels for young people in scattered (158.70) and clu...
