Detailed definition of
"Social Competence"
This project is focused on curriculum-based approaches to enhance personal, social, emotional and behavioural competence and development for all pupils in primary and secondary schools.
Definitions:
But what do we mean by Social Competence? Our provisional definition: Social Competence is possessing and using the ability to integrate thinking, feeling and behaviour to achieve social tasks and outcomes valued in the host context and culture. In a school setting, these tasks and outcomes would include accessing the school curriculum successfully, meeting associated personal social and emotional needs, and developing transferable skills and attitudes of value beyond school.
Very different social competencies are required and valued in different contexts. Behaviours which are dysfunctional and disapproved of in one context might be functional and approved of in another. Through thinking and feeling, the socially competent person is able to select and control which behaviours to emit and which to suppress in any given context, to achieve any given objective set by themselves or prescribed by others.
This relativistic definition deliberately omits any specification of a particular outcome. However, populist conceptions of social competence often assume specific outcomes, implying but not making explicit culturally based value judgements.
The definition also suggests that a major part of social competence is a set of component skills or procedures applied conditionally. These might include perception of relevant social cues, interpretation of social cues, realistic anticipation of obstacles to personally desired behaviour, anticipation of consequences of behaviour for self and others, generation of effective solutions to interpersonal problems, translation of social decisions into effective social behaviours, and the expression of a positive sense of self-efficacy.
This implies an essentially information-processing model of social behaviour, with an input (decoding) stage, a central processing and decision-making stage, and an output (encoding) stage.
However, it does not imply a predominantly cognitive model, and in particular the importance of feeling at all stages should not be underestimated. Feelings can relate to the self, other people, groups and affiliations, objects, places and activities, as well as specific events and behaviours. Feelings can be problematic when in excess, in deficit, or distorted or inappropriate. Feelings can stimulate, mediate and reinforce thoughts and behaviour. Feelings may need to be managed directly through the emotions, rather than circuitously through thinking and behaviour.
While social competence implies intentionality, of course there might be several effective pathways to the same outcome in any context. Also, sometimes successful outcomes might be attributed by the child to random chance or external factors, validly or otherwise. Thus it is very simplistic to define social competence only in terms of specific skills or only in terms of specific outcomes, especially when the latter are valued very differently by different groups and cultures. Operational definitions of desirable skills and outcomes are likely to be highly adult-centred, and might neglect the child's own objectives. It follows that peer definition and assessment of social competence might be equally or more valid than adult assessment. Similarly, children perceived by adults as having a "poor self-image" within an adult-dominated context might feel very differently about themselves in a peer-dominated context - children have multiple self-concepts as well as multiple intelligences.
Although different cultures and contexts value different social behaviours, there is nevertheless some broad consensus in most societies about what is desirable: establishing and maintaining a range of positive social relationships; refraining from harming others; contributing collaboratively and constructively to the peer group, family, school workplace and community; engaging in behaviours which enhance and protect health; avoiding behaviours with serious negative consequences for the individual or others or both.
However, it is significant that a number of these are expressed negatively, seeking to define social competence as the absence of social incompetence. This highlights the need to term specific behaviours as socially competent or incompetent, not so label children. Although it might in principle be meaningful to term a person socially competent as a function of the number of social skills they possessed, the number of contexts in which they could demonstrate them, and the number of different objectives they could thereby achieve, quantifying these performance indicators would prove very difficult.