Argentine Validation of the Self Report and Parent Version of the Matson Evaluation of Social Skills with Youngsters (MESSY)

ANNIE KARIN SCHULZ-BEGLE

Melbourne, Australia

Congreso; 27th International Congress of Applied Psychology; 2010

International Association of Applied Psychology

One of the most widely used scales for the assessment of social skills in children and adolescents is the Matson Evaluation of Social Skills with Youngsters. Although this scale has been validated in several countries, the need for a psychometrically solid scale to measure the social skills of Argentine children has emerged in several reports. The scope of this study was to examine the psychometric properties of the self report and parent version of the MESSY scale in diverse settings of the Argentine population. Subjects were 564 children (53% girls, 47% boys) from 8 to 12 years old and 266 parents, residing in the greater Buenos Aires metropolitan area, Paraná (province of Entre Ríos) and rural populations of the province of Misiones, Argentina. The instruments used were the Matson Evaluation of Social Skills with Youngsters, Home and Community Social Behavior Scale, Positive Affect and Negative Affect Scale for Children, and Louvain Loneliness Scale for Children. Statistical procedures included factor analyses, reliability tests, correlations and univariate and multivariate analyses of variance. The scale contains four dimensions (KMO = .81; c2 = 5299.39, p = .000) in agreement with the dimensions of the Spanish and Brazilian versions and which are confirmed by the scree plot: appropriate social skills or assertiveness, aggressiveness or antisocial behavior, overconfidence and social anxiety or loneliness. All Cronbach alphas ranged from .60 to .86 for the self report and from .73 to .90 for the parent version. The scale has also shows construct, convergent and discriminant validity. There is a significant correlation among the reports of children and parents both in the general score and in each dimension except for the social anxiety factor.   The Argentine validation in the childhood population of the MESSY scale proved to be convincing, showing sound psychometric properties similar to those of previous validations taken place in Australia, Spain and Brazil.