Use when assessing social skill deficits, designing BST-based social skills training programs, implementing video modeling or peer-mediated interventions, planning social skills groups, or programming for generalization of social behavior across settings and people.
Social skills training (SST) encompasses a range of behavioral procedures designed to teach, strengthen, and generalize social interaction repertoires. Social skills are complex behavioral chains that involve discriminating social cues, selecting contextually appropriate responses, executing those responses, and adjusting based on the social partner's reaction. Deficits in social skills are pervasive across many clinical populations and are among the most impactful targets in ABA programming because of their broad effects on quality of life, peer relationships, inclusion, and independence.
Effective SST begins with a thorough assessment to identify specific skill deficits (the learner lacks the skill) vs. performance deficits (the skill is in the repertoire but not performed consistently).
Direct observation: Observe the learner in natural social contexts (playground, classroom, lunchroom, community). Record frequency, duration, and quality of social initiations, responses, turn-taking, topic maintenance, and social reciprocity. This is the gold standard — it reveals what the learner actually does, not what they can do.
Structured role play: Present standardized social scenarios and score the learner's response. Useful for assessing skills that may not occur frequently in natural observation (e.g., assertiveness, conflict resolution, responding to teasing).
Rating scales: Standardized instruments (e.g., Social Skills Improvement System [SSIS], Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales — Socialization domain) completed by parents, teachers, and the learner. Provide norm-referenced data and track progress over time.
Sociometric measures: Peer nominations ("Who do you like to play with?") and peer ratings. Reveal the learner's social standing within a peer group. Useful for identifying learners at risk for social isolation.
Functional assessment of social behavior: When social behavior is absent, determine why — is it a skill deficit (cannot perform), a performance deficit (can but does not), a fluency deficit (can but not quickly/smoothly enough), or an interfering behavior problem (competing responses)?
BST is the gold-standard teaching package for social skills. It includes four sequential components:
Provide explicit verbal or written rules about the target social skill:
Keep instructions concise and age-appropriate. For young children, use simple language and visual supports. For adolescents and adults, include rationale and social context.
Demonstrate the target skill so the learner can observe the correct performance:
The learner practices the skill in a structured role-play scenario:
Immediately after rehearsal, provide specific feedback:
Basic video modeling: A peer or adult model demonstrates the target skill on video. The learner watches the video before practicing.
Video self-modeling (VSM): The learner is recorded performing the skill correctly (often with prompts that are edited out), then watches themselves performing the skill. Powerful because the learner sees themselves as competent. Requires editing capability.
Point-of-view video modeling: The video is filmed from the learner's perspective (first-person view). The learner sees the social scenario as they would experience it. Particularly useful for learners who struggle with perspective-taking.
Video prompting: Video segments are shown one step at a time, with the learner performing each step before viewing the next. Useful for complex social routines with many steps.
Social Stories are individualized short stories that describe a social situation, relevant cues, and appropriate responses using a specific ratio of sentence types:
Social Stories are best used as a supplement to direct instruction, not as a standalone intervention. They are most effective for learners with reading comprehension skills who can internalize the narrative.
Peers are the natural social environment. Training peers as social facilitators produces more natural social interactions and promotes generalization more effectively than adult-mediated instruction alone.
PRT targets pivotal areas that produce widespread collateral changes in social behavior: