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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.
KEY WORDS
* human activities
* interpersonal relations
* reproducibility of results
* social behavior
* social environment
Supporting a person's occupational engagement and participation is the focus of occupational therapy (American Occupational Therapy Association [AOTA], 2002, 2008; Baum, 2003). The second edition of the Occupational Therapy Practice Framework (AOTA, 2008) specifically acknowledges the social interactions necessary for occupational engagement. People interact during work, leisure and play, education, and activities of daily living within the context of orchestrating daily occupations. Social skills often support or hinder success as people engage in occupations (Kopelowicz, Liberman, & Zarate, 2006). Social interaction skills are
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)
The need for occupational therapists to consider social interaction skills in the performance of occupations (social interaction) is not new to the profession. Doble, Bonnell, and Magill-Evans (1991) reported that occupational therapists provide intervention to support social interaction skills. However, they also found that occupational therapists lacked an evaluation tool with...