A multimeasure performance-based assessment of social competence in young children with disabilities

Social competence is a concept that has been defined and measured in many w ays. Odom and McConnell (1985) proposed a performance-based assessment of s ocial competence that involved significant social agents in children's envi ronments to make judgments about the competence of the children's social be havior. This study constructed and initially evaluated such an approach for assessing social competence of young children with disabilities. A multime thod assessment of children's social competence (i.e., direct observation, observer impressions, teacher rating, peer ratings) was conducted with 222 preschool children with and without disabilities. Principal component analy sis yielded four factors, the first of which accounted for the largest perc entage of variance and may be the better global assessment of social compet ence. Results of this investigation are discussed conceptually with respect to the adequacy of multiple-measure performance based approaches and empir ically with regard to the possibility of using these measures to evaluate f actors affecting the development of social competence in early childhood sp ecial education.