You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This poster presents the background and process involved in developing a new measure of peer-reported young adult social competence using Q-sort methodology. Although social competence has been defined variously in the literature, it is defined here as the attainment of developmentally appropriate goals in social contexts (Ford 1982). In longitudinal and cross-sectional research, social competence has been shown to be associated with a spectrum of positive outcomes, including lower levels of psychopathology, enhanced coping, future social adjustment, and lower delinquency and academic dropout rates (Parker and Asher 1987). The ability to recruit and maintain friendships is a key aspect of positive psychosocial functioning, across the life span and for young adults specifically (Rubin, Bukowski, and Parker 1998).
The measure of peer-reported young adult social competence that we created is a Q-sort “mega-item,” developed using Q-sort methodology (Block 1974). A Q-sort is an arranged set of descriptive items. Friends, nominated by the subject being studied, distribute items into nine piles, from “least characteristic” to “most characteristic” of the subject, and this distribution of items represents the friends’ perceptions—a “map” of the Q-sort items—of a person they know well. One application of the Q-sort is a mega-item, a selection (usually 5-15 items) of Q-sort items that are aspects of a particular characteristic. The placement of each item in the Q-sort is treated as a score (1 - 9). Each component's score is then added to obtain a “mega-item” score, which is the score for that particular characteristic.
The measure was developed and tested using data from Hauser and colleagues’ 25-year longitudinal research project (Hauser 1991), using peer-rated Q-sorts of 133 young adults ages 23 to 25. The subjects had originally been recruited at ages 13 to 15 from two groups, a psychiatrically hospitalized nonpsychotic group and a high school control group. As young a