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Key Skills Elements of Early Social Interaction

One way for early interventionists to measure progress toward proficiency in social competence in infants and toddlers, 0 to 3 years of age, is the Early Social Indicator (ESI). The ESI is a play-based observational measure of a child’s growth in social skills with toys, a peer, and a familiar adult occurring during a 6-minute play period.

Three of 7 social skills and 7 composite scores were selected to comprise the ESI based on a conceptual review of the literature followed by validation with other criterion measures of the socio-emotional ability for children this age (see ESI Technical Soundness).

The key skill elements that occur in play with toys likely to evoke play and social interaction were: Negative, Positive Nonverbal, and Positive Verbal social behaviors. This framework separates the refinements-expansions in positive nonverbal behaviors expected in infants (i.e., smiles, gestures), from positive verbal social expected of children 12 months and older (i.e., use of words in greetings, bids to play, etc.). These positive nonverbal and verbal social behaviors are also expected to be distributed differently to adults, to peers, and to both persons (i.e., nondirected). Young children interact more frequently with adults than peers; with peer interaction and play emerging in older children.

These skills were selected to represent the negative and positive social behavior domains, important to understanding a child’s current and future social-emotional adjustment across settings. For typically developing children, children increase from nonverbal to verbal social behaviors and; few if any, negative behaviors. For children with disabilities, trajectories may reflect more frequently occurring negative behaviors in the case of externalizing behavior problems. Some children’s trajectories also may lack age appropriate positive social behavior due to internalizing behavior problems or delays developing speech and/or signed or facilitated communication.

The rates of occurrence of these key skills were brought together to form separate indicators of Negative, Positive Nonverbal and Positive Verbal social behavior and a Total Social score. The complete definitions are described in ESI Scoring Definitions.

Key Skill Definitions

Negative Social Behavior:
Social behaviors are recorded as either negative or positive. Social behaviors are recorded as negative when they involve aggression, hitting, kicking, threatening, grabbing another’s toy, or other negative behavior. For children this age, crying is considered to be an acceptable form of social-communication. However, it is not recorded as a social behavior for the ESI.

Positive Nonverbal Social Behavior:
Social behaviors are positive when they are greetings, offers to play, requests, etc. Positive nonverbal social behaviors are gesture-based attempts to communicate. Examples include smiling at, giving or showing object, rejecting an object by pushing it away, reaching toward, or touching a partner or object the partner is holding, pointing toward an object or person (may or may not be used to establish joint attention), nodding or shaking head to indicate "yes" or "no", shrugging shoulders.

Positive Verbal Social Behavior:
Positive verbal social behaviors are vocal (or sign language) attempts to communicate using non-words, single word, or multiple word utterances. False starts or stutters are counted as one verbalization. For example, "I think this is . . . this looks like a dog" counts as one verbalization. Some examples of verbal social behaviors are animal sounds, e.g., "moo," when looking at a cow, transportation/motor sounds like "vroom," when pushing a tractor, blows to ask for more bubbles, sequentially naming objects, such as "block, red, phone, girl" (tally for each word), a vocalization in which only one word is understandable, or imitation (could be sounds, non-sense words, or sensible words), or standard sign language coded as appropriate for single words.

Total Social:
Total Social is a single composite score combining the three key skills. Total Social = ((Total Positive NonVerbal + Total Positive Verbal) - Negative)/6 minutes. As indicated in the formula, this combination is accomplished by subtracting the frequency of negative behaviors from the total of the two positive behaviors (nonverbal and verbal). This frequency is divided by 6 minutes (the length of the assessment) to produce a rate of social behavior per minute.