Social Skills and Learning Disabilities: Causal, Concomitant, or Correlational?

Abstract

This article reviews evidence concerning the Interagency Committee on Learning Disabilities's (ICLD) proposal to include social skills deficits as a specific learning disability. Three hypotheses that have been discussed in the literature were proposed: (a) causal, suggesting that social skills deficits of some children with learning disabilities are caused by central nervous system (CNS) dysfunction; (b) concomitant, where social skills deficits coexist with and result from academic deficits; and (c) correlational, where social skills and academic skills are correlated, but no cause and effect relationship exists between them. Little evidence was found to support the causal hypothesis primarily because all of the research in support of this hypothesis has been based on correlational specificity research design. More evidence was found for the concomitant hypothesis; however, this research base also is correlational in nature. The strongest evidence favors the correlational hypothesis in that there are low to moderate correlations between social and academic skills and these correlations increase as a function of the domain of social skill measured. A fourth, functional relationship hypothesis was argued as the most parsimonious, generalizable, and treatment valid approach to conceptualizing social skills deficits across all students.

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Frank M. Gresham

Frank M. Gresham, PhD, is Professor and Director, School Psychology Training Program, University of California, Riverside, CA. His research interests include social skills assessment and training, behavioral consultation, behavior disorders, and applications of experimental analysis of behavior to school-based interventions.