Validity and Reliability of an Adaptation of Personal and Social Skills Scale for K-Students for Use in 2.691 Greek Elementary Students

The Personal and Social Skills Scale for Preschool K-Students Aged 4 6 (Kourmousi & Koutras, in Kourmousi, 2012) is a measure comprising eight subscales, designed to measure kindergarten students’ personal and social skills in the school environment. The presented study aimed to adapt it for use in elementary students—also adding two more dimensions, namely “Responsibility Taking” and “Use of Spoken and Written language”—and assess its reliability and validity in a sample of 2.691 first and second graders of Greek elementary schools. The adapted scale’s construct validity was examined initially by an exploratory factor analysis (EFA). The adapted scale’s correlation with the Behavioral Academic Self-Esteem (B.A.S.E.) scale and with demographic information was also investigated. Internal consistency reliability was satisfactory with Cronbach’s alphas ranging from 0.82 to 0.92 for all subscales. EFA identified an 11 factor model. The extracted factors explained 70.9% of the total variance. All subscales were found to be significantly and positively correlated with each other. Correlations of self-esteem with all subscales were also significant with the highest ones found with Problem Solving, Concentration of Attention, Participation/Cooperation in class, Friendship skills and Use of Spoken and Written Language. In most questionnaire subscales lower scores were exhibited by boys, by younger students, by those who did not comprehend the spoken language well, by students who received special eduHow to cite this paper: Kourmousi, N., Markogiannakis, G., Lazaridis, I., Kolliopoulou, K., Papoutsaki, K., Kounenou, K., Tzavara, C., & Koutras, V. (2017). Validity and Reliability of an Adaptation of Personal and Social Skills Scale for K-Students for Use in 2.691 Greek Elementary Students. Creative Education, 8, 2352-2376. https://doi.org/10.4236/ce.2017.814161 Received: October 13, 2017 Accepted: November 27, 2017 Published: November 30, 2017 Copyright © 2017 by authors and Scientific Research Publishing Inc. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY 4.0). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Open Access


Introduction
Scientific studies and clinical applications regarding children's and adolescents' personal and social skills have become quite important since the 80s, mainly due to the increasing recognition of the significant role of social-emotional development in children's well-being; Since Daniel Goleman's first publication of his best-selling popular book titled "Emotional Intelligence" (1995), it has been acknowledged that emotional and social skills may be more important to our happiness and success in life, than IQ or intelligence (Merrell & Gimpel, 2014).
Another important reason for the rising interest towards children's personal and social skills is that retrospective investigations have consistently shown strong relations between childhood social competence and social, academic and psychological functioning (Michelson et al., 2013).

The Concepts of Personal and Social Skills
In order to describe personal and social skills, terms such as "personal characteristics," "non-cognitive skills," "life skills", "socio-emotional skills" and even "21 st century skills" have been used for a wide array of attributes like resilience and cooperation skills, which are considered valuable and necessary in many settings, including work and education (Lievens & Sackett, 2012). Inany case, in order to be able to examine the content and the definition of personal and social skills it should firstly be noted that the term skill indicates rather a set of learned and acquired behaviors than a personality trait (Michelson et al., 2013).
Regarding the concept of personal skills, in the work sector, they are considered as generic capabilities "which allow people to succeed in a wide range of tasks and jobs and include effective communication, negotiation skills, problem solving ability and ability to work in teams" (American Employment Department, 1991, in Harrison, 1996). Botvin and Willis (1985) stress that the necessary ones in order to function effectively as adults should be developed during youth, and include effective and responsible decision making, techniques for coping with stress and anxiety, and basic principles of personal behavior N. Kourmousi Griffin and his colleagues (2001), use the term personal competence skills, describing decision-making, self-control, and self-regulation skills. They also argue that although a great deal of research has shown the positive impact of social skills enhancement, fewer studies have focused on the potential protective role of personal skills such as cognitive and behavioral self-management strategies.
Regarding the definition of social skills, Merrell and Gimpel (2014) conclude that the concept is "among the most widely misunderstood and ill-defined of all psychological constructs" (p. 3), mostly due to the diversity of related traits, abilities, and behaviors, and to the complexity of the behavior-environment interaction necessary for their acquisition and performance. According to Michelson et al. (2013) social skills are generally regarded as a set of complex interpersonal behaviors. Gresham (1986) proposes a division of social skills' definitions in three general types: 1) Peer acceptance ones, which tend to rely on peer acceptance indices (e.g. sociometric techniques), 2) Behavioral ones which tend to explain social skills as situation-specific behaviors, and 3) Social validity ones which view social skills as predictors of important social outcomes, such as good social relations. Merrell and Gimpel (2014) emphasize that the vast number of social skills' definitions apart from their differences also contain important similarities: "Social skills are learned, composed of specific behaviors, include initiations and responses, maximize social reinforcement, are interactive and situation-specific, and can be specified as targets for intervention" (p. 11). However, there is no valid and agreed-upon taxonomy for their classification. Merrell and Gimpel (2014) propose "the use of multivariate techniques, such as factor analysis, in order to derive empirically based clusters of highly intercorrelated behaviors" (p. 11) as a solution to this issue. According to their suggestion, these clusters should then be labeled by the researcher, based on the types of the specific behaviors included in the cluster, in order to identify the underlying behavioral dimension (Merrell & Gimpel, 2014). What should also be noted is, that even though quite a large number of dimensional approach studies has been conducted in order to classify problem behaviors, relatively few studies have used this kind of approach in order to classify children's or adolescents' social skills (Merrell, 1994). Caldarella and Merrell (1997) identified the most common social skill dimensions, -on which Merrell and Gimpel (2014) prompt future researchers to consider focusing for assessment and intervention (p. 13)-occurring in one third or more of the studies they examined in their meta-analysis review: 1) Peer relations (social interaction, prosocial, interpersonal, peer preferred social behavior, empathy, social participation, sociability-leadership, peer reinforcement, general, peer sociability).
2) Self-management (self-control/social convention, social independence, social competence, social responsibility, rules, frustration tolerance). However, when comparing the content of personal and social skills' categories as described in the literature, we cannot help but notice that skills such as self-control, frustration tolerance and assertiveness fall into both of them. This can explain the fact that sometimes personal skills are referred to as "social skills" and contrasted with "cognitive" and "intellectual" skills (Harrison, 1996). It is also worth mentioning that skills like stress and anxiety management, self-control and self-regulation, also constitute the content of another skills' group, defined as emotional skills (Denham, 2005;Humphrey et al., 2011). Moreover, skills such as decision-making, critical thinking, problem solving, self-direction and teamwork and collaboration are also characterized as "21 st century skills" and included in the relative curricula (Kyllonen, 2012).
Extensive evidence, deriving from a wide range of studies on promotion, prevention, and treatment interventions has shown that youth can learn personal and social skills (Losel & Beelman 2003). However, research has also shown that new skills cannot be acquired immediately. As Durlak, Weissberg and Pachan (2010) state, "it takes time and effort to develop new behaviors and more complicated skills must be broken down into smaller steps and sequentially mastered. Therefore, a coordinated sequence of activities is required that links the learning steps and provides youth with opportunities to connect these steps.
Usually, this occurs through lesson plans or program manuals, particularly if programs use or adapt established curricula" (p. 296).

Assessment of Personal and Social Skills
The accurate measurement of personal and social skills in children and young people has crucial implications for public health, as Denham and colleagues (2009) state, because of the associations with mental health, academic performance, and other key outcomes. Assessment is also an essential element of effective interventions in youth's personal and social skills enhancement. It includes careful identification, classification and selection.
Regarding the assessment of personal skills-defined as such-there has been limited research. Studies seem to focus on investigating one or more personal skills at a time rather than examining them in a group. For example Griffin (Merrell, 1993), the Social Skills Rating System (SSRS) (Gresham & Elliot, 1990), and the Scales of Social Competence and School Adjustment (SSCSA) (Walker-McConnell, 1995)] are the two best choices for social skills assessment. Interviewing and sociometric techniques may constitute an important part of an assessment design but would be considered second choices, argues the same author, adding that projective-expressive techniques or objective, self-report instruments may help in further clarification of the results but should only be used in a complimentary manner (Merrell, 2001).
A number of key issues regarding the assessment of personal and social skills are suggested in the literature. In brief, these refer to 1) the distinction between capturing typical and maximal behavior, 2) the extent to which the measures provide information that is distinct or unique among existing constructs (e.g., personality), 3) the scope and specificity of measures (e.g., single, unidimensional vs. complex, multidimensional), and 4) the provider of the information (e.g., children, teacher, parent, peers) (Humphrey et al., 2011). General guidelines for evaluating such skills scales include user friendliness, clearly delineated norming procedure, detailed description, appropriateness and interpretation of scores, as well as validity and reliability (Demaray et al., 1995).
Concerning the use of such measures in Greek students or children and youth in general, there has only been one behavior rating scale investigating both personal and social skills, namely the Personal and Social Skills Scale for Preschool K-Students Aged 4 -6 ( Kourmousi et al., 2017;Kourmousi & Koutras, in Kourmousi, 2012).
No other scale has been used for the investigation of personal skills, while for the investigation of social skills there have only been used interviews (e.g. Kiria- zis & Zaharias, 2015) and self-reports, such as the Greek version (Vassilopoulos et al., 2013) of the Children's Self-report Social Skills Scale (CS4) (Danielson & Phelps, 2003, in Mitropoulou, 2012and Karabatsou, 2014, the Greek version (Goudas Magotsiou & Hatzigeorgiadis, 2009)

of the Feelings Toward Group
Work Questionnaire (Cantwell & Andrews, 2002, in Magotsiou, 2007and in Filippou, 2013, and the Social Skills Rating System (Student Form-Elementary Grades) (Gresham & Elliott, 1990, in Statiri, 2015. K-program (Kourmousi et al., 2017: pp. 27-29). Its first part consists of items concerning demographics, while the second part consists of 77 items describing students' behaviors as exhibited in kindergarten settings and assessed by their teachers. Out of the 77 items 30 are adaptations from other skills' assessment scales for preschoolers (Kusché & Greenberg, 1994;Merrell 1994;Shure, 2005).

The Personal and Social Skills Scale for Preschool K-Students
The measure also uses the Coopersmith & Gilberts' Behavioral Academic (1982), translated and adapted in Greek by Kakouros & Maniadaki (2002), in order to assess the self-esteem dimension.
The presented study aims to adapt the Personal and Social Skills Scale for Preschool K-Students Aged 4 -6 ( Kourmousi et al., 2017;Kourmousi & Koutras, in Kourmousi, 2012) for use in Greek elementary students aged 7 -9 and examine its validity and reliability. Our main hypothesis is that the adaptation of the scale is a reliable and valid behavior rating measure for assessing Greek elementary students' personal and social skills. Additionally, we aim to investigate two more dimensions, namely Responsibility taking and Use of spoken and written language, by adding relevant subscales to the measure. Moreover, we aim to investigate possible correlations, hypothesizing that, factors like sex, age, need for special education assistance, same grade re-attendance, comprehension of the spoken language, and maternal education level, might affect students' personal and social skills.

Participants
The study took place in October 2013, in 6 educational prefectures in Attica region, in which Greece's capital-Athens-is located. These prefectures consist of urban, semi-urban, industrial and agricultural areas as well, thus representing all country's socioeconomic groups of inhabitants (Greek Statistical Authority, 2011). 126 elementary teachers participated in our study and completed a questionnaire for each of their students. Their 2.691 students formed our sample.
It should be noted that in the Greek educational system students who are diagnosed with learning difficulties or other problems (e.g. behavioral disorders), can attend an Integration Class besides their mainstream one, for up to twelve hours weekly. In such a class personal or group instruction is offered. Another option for the diagnosed children is the provision of Parallel Support, which is the official designation of the individual support offered to each child by a specially assigned teacher, within the mainstream class.

Measures
The study questionnaire consisted of: 1) Items concerning demographics, school features, family status and parents' educational level.
2) An adaptation of the Personal and Social Skills Scale for Preschool K-Students and are teacher-rated, with answers ranging from 1 = never or almost never, to 7 = always or almost always. Our version kept 75 out of the 77 items of the scale questions and adapted them in order to assess students' behaviors in elementary school settings.
3) Two more subscales assessing the dimensions of "Responsibility taking" and "Use of spoken and written language", including 5 and 15 items respectively, and rated in the same way. (1982), which includes 16 items and examines students' self-esteem as expressed by their behaviors in the school environment. The scale has been translated and adapted in Greek by Kakouros & Maniadaki (2002), and is also teacher-rated, by a 5 point Likert scale.

Data Collection
The anonymous questionnaires-one for each student-were administered to the 126teachers of our sample students, in October 2013. The teachers were instructed to complete them within 7 -10 days.

Ethical Considerations
The study protocol was approved by the Greek Ministry of Education and permission was granted by the Greek Institute of Educational Policy (Ref. Φ15/806/174250/Γ1/18-11-2013). The license was granted on the condition of parents' consent on the completion of a questionnaire regarding their child, and therefore, participating teachers acquired a written consensus from each student's parents, prior to the completion of the corresponding questionnaire.

Statistical Methods-Data Analyses
Continuous variables are presented with mean and standard deviation (SD were explored in terms of convergent validity. Correlation coefficients between 0.1 and 0.3 were considered low, between 0.31 and 0.5 moderate and those over 0.5 were considered high. The questionnaire subscales were compared according to sex, grade, special education support (attendance of an Integration Class or receiving Parallel Support), re-attendance of the same grade, comprehension of the spoken language, and mother's educational level, using Student's t-tests and the computation of effect sizes. Effect sizes of 0.2 -0.5 are considered small, those between 0.51 -0.81 are considered moderate, and those over 0.8 are considered large. It was hypothesized in terms of discriminant validity that worse outcomes would be found in boys, younger students, those who did not comprehend the spoken language well, students whose mothers had lower educational level, those in need of special education support, and those repeating the same class.
P values reported are two-tailed. Statistical significant level was set at 0.05 and analysis was conducted using SPSS 19.0 Statistical Software.

Results
Sample consisted of 2.691 students with 1.375 being boys and 1.316 being girls.
1.344 of the students were attending first grade and 1.347 were attending second grade. 3.9% of the sample attended an Integration Class of received Parallel Support-thus received special education support-and 1.9% re-attended the same grade. Sample characteristics are shown in Table 1.
An exploratory factor analysis with principal component method and with Varimax rotation was conducted on the sample. Using the latent root criterion of retaining factors with Eigenvalues greater than 1.0, an eleven-factor structure was identified, with the extracted factors explaining 70.9% of the total variance.
In the final model all items were entered into the factor analysis. Factor loadings of the rotated solution are shown in Table 2, with all factor loadings being more than 0.40.
The final subscales were thus formed as follows: 1) Concentration of attention (5 items) 2) Participation/cooperation in class (11 items  Cronbach's alpha estimated along with the mean scale scores for the produced components are presented in Table 3. Mean scores were divided by the number of items of each scale. Also, the items were reversed appropriately, so that greater scores indicated better performance. All the scales, exceeded the minimum reliability standard of 0.70. Cronbach's alphas ranged from 0.82 (Emotions' Identification and Expression) to 0.92 (Ability to control Verbal/Physical Aggressiveness, Concentration of Attention, and Participation/Cooperation in class). Table 4 shows intercorrelations among the questionnaire subscales. All subscales were significantly and positively correlated with each other with correlations coefficients ranging from low to high.
The highest correlations were found between "Ability to control Verbal and Physical Aggressiveness" and "Emotions' Management", "Problem Solving" and "Use of Spoken and Written Language", "Ability to control Verbal and Physical Aggressiveness" and "Responsibility Taking", "Concentration of Attention" and "Participation/Cooperation in class" and "Responsibility Taking" and "Emotions' Management". Correlations of self-esteem with all subscales were significant and the highest were found with Problem Solving, Concentration of Attention, Participation/Cooperation in class, Friendship skills and Use of Spoken and Written Language.
Girls exhibited greater scores an all subscales as compared with boys (Table   5).  Effect sizes of the differences were small with the exception of Ability to control Verbal and Physical Aggressiveness, and Concentration of Attention and Participation/Cooperation in class where medium effect sizes were found. Concerning differences between students of first and second grade (Table 5), lower scores were found in first grade ones, for Ability to control Verbal and Physical Aggressiveness, Emotions' Management, Ability to control Victimization, Use of Spoken and Written Language and Responsibility Taking, but with small effect sizes.
All questionnaire subscales were found to have lower scores in children that attended an Integration Class or received a Parallel Support, and in those that repeated the same grade (Table 6).
Concerning differences of special education needs, -namely attendance of an Integration Class or receiving Parallel Support-effect sizes were medium to high. Similarly, effect sizes of the differences between children that repeated the same grade and those that did not, were medium to high, with the exception of the effect size for Emotions' Management which was small.
Differences in questionnaire subscales according to comprehension of the spoken language (Greek) and mother's educational level are shown in Table 7.
All subscales provided greater scores for cases with Very good or Excellent comprehension of the Greek language and effect sizes were mostly medium. Also, lower scores on all subscales except for Ability to control Verbal and Physical Aggressiveness and Emotions' Management were found in children whose mothers had lower educational level, with effect sizes being low in most of the cases.

Discussion
The purpose of the presented study was to adapt the Personal and Social Skills     Koutras, in Kourmousi, 2012) for use in elementary students aged 7 -9, provide a new version by adding two more subscales, namely Responsibility taking and Use of spoken and written language, and examine its validity and reliability. The scale (Coopersmith & Gilberts, 1982). The difference in the number of factors in the new version occurs due to the addition of two new subscales, namely "Responsibility taking" and "Use of spoken and written language", and also due to the separation of the dimension of "Emotions' identification and management" to two dimensions, "Emotions' identification and expression" and "Emotions' management", respectively. Cronbach's alpha for all the questionnaire subscales was acceptable and ranged from 0.82 to 0.92. All the questionnaire dimensions were significantly correlated not only with each other but also with the B.A.S.E (Coopersmith & Gilberts, 1982) scale as well, with the results remaining similar when correlations were examined separately in control and intervention group (p < 0.05). Intercorrelations with the B.A.S.E (Coopersmith & Gilberts, 1982) scale provided further construct validity evidence for the newly developed version. Similar results and correlations were found regarding the original version of the Personal and Social Skills Scale for Preschool K-Students Aged 4 -6 (Kourmousi et al., 2017), confirming our findings.
Differences in questionnaire dimensions concerning the investigation of factors like sex, age, comprehension of the spoken language, re-attendance of the same grade, need for special education assistance, and maternal education level, were also found, further confirming the sensitivity of the new measure.
First graders also scored lower than second graders. This finding implies that during their first school years, young children's personal and social skills do improve by age, probably due to maturation and to gained experiences, as other researchers have found (Eisenberg & Fabes, 1998;Halberstadt, Denham, & Dunsmore, 2001).
Lower scores were also detected in students who did not comprehend the spoken language well. This is a common finding in the relevant literature (Kourmousi, 2012;Cassidy et al., 2003, Espinosa, 2002Saarni, 2001, Mundy & Walker et al., 1994), which could imply that comprehension of things said by adults and by peers help children understand rules and norms, socialize, and develop their personal and social skills. It could also point to underlying cognitive difficulties.
Re-attendance of the same grade and need for special education assistance also predicted lower scoring in our study's scale. This can be explained by the findings of other studies (Reiter & Lapidot-Lefler, 2007;Jahoda, Pert, & Trower, 2006;Luckasson et al., 2002) which have shown that delay in aspects of cognitive development affects the socio-emotional development as well. As researchers state, populations with intellectual disabilities are deprived in social adjustment and social skills and competencies (Reiter & Lapidot-Lefler, 2007;Jahoda, Pert, & Trower, 2006;Luckasson et al., 2002).
Mothers' educational level also seemed to affect students' social and emotional children. Not to our surprise-since other researchers (Desforges & Abouchaar, 2003;Peisner-Feinberg et al., 2001) corroborate this finding-children whose mothers had a low educational level, exhibited lower levels of personal and social skills as well.

Limitations and Strengths
The main strength of the presented study is the large sample and its representativeness due to the representation of urban and rural and industrial areas. Furthermore, the percentage of the study participants' representation concerning sex and special education structures' attendance is identical with the one reported by the Greek Statistical Authority for students of the 2013-2014 academic year (Greek Statistical Authority, 2013). In addition, we were able to confirm the good fit of the adaptation of the Personal and Social Skills Scale for Preschool K-Students Aged 4 -6 (Kourmousi et al., 2017;Kourmousi & Koutras, in Kourmousi, 2012) for use in Greek elementary students. However, limitations can also be identified in the presented study; given that the design of the study was cross-sectional, we were not able to examine the scale's sensitivity over time or its test-retest reliability.

Conclusion
The results of the presented study support our main hypothesis, namely that the adaptation of the Personal and Social Skills Scale for Preschool K-Students Aged language, re-attendance of the same grade, need for special education assistance, and maternal education level would affect our sample students' personal and social skills were also supported by the study's findings. We hope, however, that additional personal and social skills related research will be conducted in the future in Greece, not only in 7 -9 years old elementary students, but in all elementary and high school students as well.

Emotions' Management
How often does the student 1) Get excessively bothered when he/she loses 2) Get easily bothered when he/she encounters difficulties during work 3) Get easily upset by peers or adults, when checked for things he/she did. 4) Find ways to calm himself/herself when he/she gets angry and upset 5) Try to find ways to handle waiting 6) Show obstinacy (stubbornness) and want his/her way 7) Act impulsively 8) Lose temper during disputes

Responsibility Taking
How often does the student 1) Easily recognize his/her own responsibility when engaged in a conflict 2) Use expressions like: "it's his/her (the other child's) fault", "he/she (the other child) started it first", etc.
3) Agree to the finding of a solution after a conflict 4) Lie 5) Choose to tell the truth even when the consequences are unpleasant N. Kourmousi et al.