Teaching Social Competence

Parents and teachers can help teach social competence first by demonstrating it themselves. Second, by displaying faith in the child’s ability to achieve. Third, by explaining the existence and nature of the tools available to the child for the purposes of developing social competence (the ability to coordinate affect, cognition, and behavior). It is important that the expectations of patents and teachers for a child’s development of social competence be age appropriate.

Shall social competence have a different definition for each developmental stage? Certainly, the application of the definition requires addressing individual efficacy; it is important that children not be expected to perform beyond their developmental capacity. In that respect, social competence must be defined in terms of developmental achievement, but this task has been imposed upon us by the artificial stage demarcations that have arisen out of an intellectual construct that may have no more utility than a metaphor to help us, the observer to understand phenomena. Those demarcations may well be analogous to latitude and longitude lines drawn upon a globe. Developmental social competence underneath these lines of demarcation just might be a seamless spectrum. Far more important is a multi-dimensional criterion for assessment of social competence.

Research Validity

nternal validity is the result of an experiment being crafted in such a manner that the outcome of the experiment matches its teleology. That is to say it in fact does what it purports. In order to have internal validity the experiment must demonstrate that it was the variable manipulation and not some other extraneous cause that brought about the effect. External validity is the ability of the experimental results to be extrapolated to the general population or to another sample group.

Threats to validity are important considerations when designing studies because first the most effective response to validity threats is in the original design, specifically the design of the sampling procedure. The choice of participants must be made in such a manner as to maximize the similarity both between groups and between the groups and the population at large in order to minimize the threats to validity. There should be similarity between groups to increase internal validity; similarity between both groups and the general population to increase external validity.

Because studies take place over time the elapse of time itself can be a confounding variable especially in the study of children wherein the elapse of even a small amount of time can effect drastic changes in the operating parameters of the subjects. Also because experiments take place over time, attrition is a threat to validity not only mortality proper, but attrition due to relocation and simple dropout. These changes in the selected groups may alter the parameters carefully chosen at the beginning of the study.

During the time interval between the beginning and conclusion of a study, events may occur outside of the experiment which have a confounding effect even if irrelevant to the study. For example, a study of seasonal affective disorder in New York City conducted from August through December of 2001 might have confounded results through no fault of the study design. Outside influences can also threaten external validity, wherein a subset of a group receives an experience that enhances or detracts from the experimental treatment. Whereas the threat to internal validity is to the attribution of cause, the threat to external validity is to generalizability.

Naturally occurring developmental changes to the sample population may also introduce confounding causes. Activities of the sample population outside of the experiment may also have an adverse effect on the end result for example; a new exercise or diet fad amongst the general population may spoil the results of a concurrent weight loss study.

Pretesting may sensitize participants to not only the content of the instrumentation but also to the process of testing. Improved scores on tests may reflect improvement on what is being measured but it may merely measure the aspect of practice makes perfect. Test-pretest sensitivity is a threat to internal validity that threatens external validity as well in that the experiment repeated without the pretest may yield different results not attributable to any other factors in the repetition thereby adversely affecting generalizability.

When the administration or scoring of a test is inconsistent, the interpretation of the results has no sound basis. Validity can not only be affected by the interpretation of the statistics, but also by the statistical model itself. While regression toward the mean may be ameliorated by dropping outliers out of the equation, it is a trifle naïf to assume that the choice of the use of the mean or the median has no effect on the analysis of the data. Also the experimenters themselves may have a deleterious effect on results, whether in the administration of the test or by unintended non-verbal cues of the tester. The threat to external validity labeled reactive arrangement is also known as the “Hawthorne effect” which has been explained as an effect of participants being aware of the experiment. However there is a simpler explanation. Elton Mayo’s observations were of worker productivity at a factory (Bell, Paul A., Green, Thomas C., Fisher, Jeffery D., Baum, Andrew 2001). Anyone who has worked on a production line would be able to explain the increase in productivity when an experimenter changed the independent variable not so much as the result of condition changes but as a result of worker fatigue having a smaller effect on worker productivity when the worker is under supervisory or other observation. It is also trifle naïf to assume that observation has no effect upon the thing observed.

John Dewey Human Nature and conduct

There is a positive and negative side to morals. In ethics it may be sufficient to do no harm, but morals go beyond mere avoidance of the contumely of society. This is the spiritual pride of the prodigal son’s elder brother. Claiming moral praiseworthiness only on the basis of an absence of blameworthiness is above all only another permutation of self-concern. Not being the cause of ill is not the same as creating a new good. Yet there are some who do not break their arm when patting themselves on the back based upon not being a killer or bringing harm with the best of intentions. On the other hand, there are those whose exaltation of an ideal world wherein imperfection could be seen as an opportunity for real positive change instead of confirming evidence of the dichotomy between the ideal and actual and furthermore a confirmation of a neo-Platonic distinction between personal realities such as that theorized by Rene’ Descartes.

Indeed, the Cartesian solution for the mind-body problem leads some to give up real physical morality and ethics as a bad idea unattainable in a world not ideal, something only to be pursued within the individual consciousness. This aversion to the actual drags morality away form ethics; makes it something personal and not social. Something that is divorced from human interaction, something that is exclusively human inaction. All religions condemn this form do unto others . . . to practice compassion at all times to all creatures. Even Islam whose ideal is a religious society teaches that morality is a matter of social interaction.

Dewey elucidates two theories of social change, one wherein all social improvement is founded upon the preeminent change of individual character, and one for which improved morality “trickles down” from a primary change in social institutions. Each, in promoting its preferred theory of change, asserts the impossibility of the obverse. Each limits human individual freedom. One, by exalting it to exclusive ethereality, and the other by denying it completely. Shall a person contemplate their navel until it absorbs them, or shall society be condemned to follow some law of historical evolution or dialectical materialism into the new horizon? Some would deny this dilemma. Like Dewey these would point out that human behavior is the interaction between the individual and their surroundings. Environmental psychology for the natural surroundings and social psychology for group behavior. But is group behavior the same as interaction between the individual and social environment? We see that social change can stimulate individual change and individual change can stimulate social change but is this organic change that brings reform just as planned economies fail, planned social reform brings unintended consequences. One cannot merely do one thing.

Morals are a science of ends, means, and actions. Morality is not constrained to stasis as character alone. Morality is dynamic. Morality is a matter of intelligent design. It is teleological; involved with final causes. The forces of relativism confuse the actions of the individual, the interrelationship of the individual to the environment, and the individual themselves. The morality of an act is not the result of a changing environment, but the result of the individual’s choice of interaction with that environment.

Teaching children social competence

Parents and teachers can help teach social competence first by demonstrating it themselves. Second, by displaying faith in the child’s ability to achieve. Third, by explaining the existence and nature of the tools available to the child for the purposes of developing social competence (the ability to coordinate affect, cognition, and behavior). It is important that the expectations of patents and teachers for a child’s development of social competence be age appropriate.

Shall social competence have a different definition for each developmental stage? Certainly, the application of the definition requires addressing individual efficacy; it is important that children not be expected to perform beyond their developmental capacity. In that respect, social competence must be defined in terms of developmental achievement, but this task has been imposed upon us by the artificial stage demarcations that have arisen out of an intellectual construct that may have no more utility than a metaphor to help us, the observer to understand phenomena. Those demarcations may well be analogous to latitude and longitude lines drawn upon a globe. Developmental social competence underneath these lines of demarcation just might be a seamless spectrum. Far more important is a multi-dimensional criterion for assessment of social competence.