Development of a Social Skills Inventory for Day Service care wokers

Abstract

In this study, we developed three scales that formed part of a set of social skills inventory for care wokers working in day services and examined their reliability and validity. First, based on previous studies, we developed scales as a draft and divided them into two tiers: basic skills and practical skills. In this study, we focused on the basic skills of "self-management," "observation and inference," and "independent assistantness," that is, care wokers' ways of dealing with themselves and their basic interactions with patients regardless of the situation. Using these three scales, we conducted a questionnaire survey of care wokers. We analyzed 500 responses and found a factor structure for each scale, with alpha coefficients ranging from .68 to .89, confirming the internal consistency of each scale. Also, the goodness of fit of the model was found to be within acceptable limits with respect to GFI, AGFI, CFI, RMSEA, and SRMR. Furthermore, this SS scale showed a significant positive correlation with the KiSS-18, a general SS scale. Based on these results, this scale was considered to be reliable and valid.