Comparability of the Social Skills Rating System to the Social Skills Improvement System: Content and Psychometric Comparisons Across Elementary and Secondary Age Levels

University of WashingtonThis study compared the Social Skills Rating System (SSRS; Gresham & Elliott, 1990)with the revision of the SSRS, now called the Social Skills Improvement System-Rating Scales (SSIS-RS; Gresham & Elliott, 2008), across three raters (teacher, parent,and student) for elementary- and secondary-aged students. A detailed comparison ofthese two instruments’ comparability has not been previously reported and was con-sidered important because of the frequent use of the SSRS in many externally fundedresearch studies and school districts across the country. Comparisons between the twoinstruments focused on key reliability and validity estimates across the rating scales forthree raters (teacher, parent, and student) using forms for elementary- and secondary-aged students. As hypothesized, the two instruments had high internal consistencyestimates and moderately high validity indices for total scores for both social skills andproblem behavior scales. The reliability comparisons revealed the SSIS-RS was supe-rior to the SSRS with regard to internal consistency estimates. The validity estimatesrevealed expected convergent relationships with the strongest relationships consistentlyfound among the various common subscales across all forms of the two instruments.The authors concluded that the SSIS-RS offers researchers and practitioners assessingsocial behavior of children and youth a broader conceptualization of key socialbehaviors and psychometrically superior assessment results when using the SSIS-RSover the SSRS. Future research on the SSIS-RS is also identied and contextualizedwithin a multitiered intervention system.Keywords: