Abstract
The social skills of Chinese youth are reported to be declining. Therefore, a social skills training (SST) program involving the unique cultural characteristics of Chinese people was developed, and its effectiveness was investigated. In Study 1, a SST program was developed incorporating cross-cultural social skills and the unique identity of Chinese culture. In Study 2, 98 Chinese undergraduates were divided into a control and an SST group, who participated in the new SST program. All participants were administered a series of culture-based social skills scales. The results indicated a significant effect of the SST program in the SST group compared with the control group. Moreover, the SST group showed significant changes on Chinese-culture and cross-culture scales, but no changes on the Japanese-culture scale. These effects remained at the 3-month follow-up assessment. Thus the components of cultural traits in the newly developed SST program were verified.
