Importance of Selected Communication Skills to Adolescents: Effects of Data Collection Methods

Abstract

Knowing what the more important skills are for particular communicative contexts potentially increases the odds of communicative and, therefore, social success in those contexts. This is particularly necessary for adolescents, as successful peer relationships are significant factors in their maturation. Previous investigations about adolescents' perceptions of what are more and less important communication skills for positive peer relationships have used a paper-pencil task with normally achieving (NA) adolescents in which they read statements describing 14 communication skills and ranked them according to importance or an index card-sorting approach (Q-sort) with adolescents with language impairment (LI) in which the statements for the communication skills were written at a lower reading level. No research has yet compared NA adolescents' rankings of importance on the two different tasks. Therefore, the current study explored the question of whether or not similar rankings of importance would be observed for NA adolescents using the revised Q-sort task and the paper-pencil task. Results indicated that 210 NA adolescents' rankings from the paper-pencil task concurred with 25 NA adolescents' rankings using the Q-sort task. These results suggested that the Q-sort task was a valid alternative to the original paper-pencil task for obtaining NA adolescents' opinions about the relative importance of different communication skills.