C. Douglas Simmons, Lou Ann Griswold, Brett Berg; Evaluation of Social Interaction During Occupational Engagement. Am J Occup Ther 2010;64(1):10–17. https://doi.org/10.5014/ajot.64.1.10
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The Evaluation of Social Interaction (ESI; Fisher & Griswold, 2008) assesses a person's performance of social interaction skills in the natural context with typical social partners during any area of occupation. We used Rasch analysis of 175 observations of 128 people, ages 4–73, to examine internal scale validity, the items’ skill hierarchy and intended purpose, and the ESI's ability to differentiate between people with and without disabilities. The ESI demonstrated validity for 24 of 27 skills and six intended purposes, with a hierarchy of performance. Of the observations, 95.3% demonstrated goodness of fit to the Rasch model, indicating person response validity. People without a disability demonstrated significantly higher social skills performance than those with a known disability (t = 4.468, df = 83 p = .000). The ESI has the potential to provide a quantitative assessment of social interaction performance in the natural context of a person's desired occupation and may be useful for intervention planning and outcome measurement.
individual actions or units of social behavior that are observable within the ongoing stream of performance that occur within the context of engagement in an occupation that involves social interaction. A person may exhibit more or less social interaction skill; diminished skill is characterized by “performance errors” that reflect decreased social appropriateness or effectiveness of the behavior. (Fisher & Griswold, 2008, p. 5)
Do the ESI's skill items and intended purposes of social interactions form a unidimensional scale of the quality of a client's social interaction performance?
Which skills are easy or more difficult in relation to one another?
Which intended purposes of social interactions are easier or more challenging? and
Is the ESI sensitive to differences in the quality of social interaction between people experiencing a known disability that affects social interaction performance and people not experiencing a known disability?
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