Trimming the fat: Identifying 15 underlying concepts from 26 in the social skills domain

Abstract

A large number of concepts have been proposed to describe social skills and explain social goal attainment. In this work, we identified dozens of such concepts, which have been studied for many decades across a wide variety of social science disciplines. It has been suggested that the social skills literature lacks parsimony and conceptual clarity. We take stock of these challenges and describe their origins. We identify three conceptual limitations that impede progress studying social skills and social goal attainment: redundancy (i.e., jangle fallacy), conflation (i.e., haphazard mixing of different conceptual types), and drift (i.e., jingle fallacy). We used best practices for concept revision and development, assisted by the use of machine learning, to undertake domain-level conceptual clarification, analyzing 756 definitions across six decades of research. This process led us to propose 15 core social skills-related concepts (a 42% reduction). These concepts were located within the social skills framework to begin to depict how they might relate to one another during the pursuit of social goals. This paper contributes to theory by decluttering, organizing, and simplifying the messy and redundant social skills literature and, by doing so, improves theoretical clarity. We close by suggesting areas for future research.