ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Psychology in Education
This article is part of the Research TopicLearning, skill development and motivationView all articles
Social Skills Scale: Aspects of reliability and validity of a new 9-item scale assessing social-skills
Provisionally accepted
- Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
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In this article, the psychometric properties of a new scale aimed at quantifying social skills are explored. The social skills scale is a quantitative, easy-to-administer measure designed to be context-independent. The Social Skills Scale was tested on a sample of 127 children aged 3 to 5 years (mean age = 3.83, SD = 0.72) from Iceland, allowing for an initial examination of its applicability, internal consistency, and reliability. Preschool teachers tested/evaluated the children. The findings indicate that the scale is suitable for use with children in this age range. All individual items showed positive correlations with the total score, with item-total correlation coefficients ranging from .35 to .76. The scale demonstrated high internal consistency, with a Cronbach's alpha of .89 for the standardized items. To assess inter-rater reliability, two independent observers (preschool teachers) evaluated a subset of 10 children (mean age = 4.04, SD = 0.21). The intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) between the two raters was 0.88, indicating good reliability for this age group of Icelandic children. These promising initial results support further development of the Social Skills Scale, including norming the instrument on a larger and more representative sample and carrying out further validation of the scale.
Keywords: assessment, Learning, Reliability, Social Skills, validity
Received: 16 Dec 2025; Accepted: 16 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Sigmundsson. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Hermundur Sigmundsson
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