TY - JOUR TI - Psychometrics of the SSIS in an Australian population DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3N58JVK PY - 2014 AB - The Social Skills Improvement System (SSiS; Gresham & Elliott, 2008) is a multi-stage, broadband system for assessing children in Preschool through 12th grade. Two aspects of this system were analyzed in this study: (1) the Performance Screening Guides (PSGs), a brief criterion-referenced measure, and (2) the Rating Scales (SSiS-RS), a more extensive rating system. Two samples of Australian teachers in Bundamba (n = 15) and South Brisbane (n = 30) implemented the SSiS on elementary school students. This study has the following objectives: (1) Compare the psychometric properties of US and Australian samples and (2) determine if the Australian sample displays appropriate psychometric evidence to substantiate the use of such a tool in this population. Results indicated that internal consistency reliability was good for both samples across the domains and subdomains. For some of the domains, reliability was significantly higher in the Australian sample compared to the US sample. With respect to content validity, there were some differences with regard to which social skills each sample of teachers believed were important. Teachers in the Australian sample typically rated areas as being more important compared to the US sample. With regard to internal structure validity, correlations among PSGs and SSiS-RS domains were similar between the two different countries. In addition, conditional probability analyses indicated the PSGs work appropriately as the first stage of a multiple gating procedure. The confirmatory factor analyses indicated that the three-factor model had poor fit to the data in both samples. There were few differences between the factor loadings of the two samples. Lastly, in terms of validity evidence based on relations to other variables, the individual PSG scores demonstrated low to moderate ability to predict students who displayed difficulties on corresponding areas of the Queensland Two Year Diagnostic Net, a monitoring system based on teacher judgment. Overall, the United States and Australian data demonstrated similar results for the areas explored. The results indicated adequate psychometric evidence for most of the areas measured. KW - School Psychology KW - Teachers--Australia KW - Social skills in children KW - Teachers--United States KW - Psychometrics LA - eng ER -