Scholarly record

SOCIAL SKILL DEVELOPMENT OF CHILDREN FROM SOCIALLY EXCLUDED AREA IN INFORMAL EDUCATION

P. Doulik, J. Skoda

Abstract

This contribution is connected with the social skill development of children between the ages 14 -15 who come from socially excluded areas and are educated in non-mainstream informal education realised in low-threshold social clubs for children and youth in the Czech Republic. The theoretical introduction of the thesis characterizes the approaches towards informal education in the Czech Republic, the methods applied and possible realisation of intervention and education itself. Furthermore, another discussed issue is the socially excluded areas and social handicap which children living in these areas have. Also certain amount of attention will be given towards development of social skills and abilities and their close connection to the emotional and social intelligence. The main goal of this applied study presented by this work is to open the effectivity of targeted intervention focused on the development of social skills among children who are educated in informal education. The intervention was realized throughout October and December of 2016 with a test group of children (N=32) mostly coming from socially excluded areas who attend low-threshold centres for children and youth. The study also includes input and output diagnostics of social skills with the use of a standardized test tool Social Skills Inventory (Riggio, Carney, 2007). This research tool provides the data of social skill level in six dimensions. These are emotional expressivity, emotional sensitivity, emotional control, social expressivity, social sensitivity, and social control. During the research study the diagnostics of the social skill level was recorded before the targeted intervention (pre-test phase) and after the intervention (post-test phase). The results were then tested by the normality distribution via Shapiro-Wilk test followed by comparison with the F-test and Student's t-statistic. The results show positive effect of the realized intervention for social skill development among children from socially excluded areas. The development of individual social skill dimensions is unfortunately uneven. The results point to the necessity of focusing mainly on the development of emotion control.

Publication details

Back to publication list