Developing a Methodology for Evaluating the Effectiveness of Talkabout: A Social Skills Programme

The aim of this thesis was to develop an effective methodology to evaluate the Talkabout programme. The potential negative outcomes linked to social and emotional skills is clearly outlined in the literature, as is the need for UK based research with heterogeneous groups of children. Talkabout is a popular UK based social communication programme which has much anecdotal evidence but lacks empirical research. The initial research question aimed to fill this research gap by evaluating the effectiveness of the intervention in mainstream primary schools. This quantitative study highlighted the need to identify a robust measure of the Talkabout programme which was addressed using a systematic review to evaluate available social skills assessments and a further quantitative primary study which evaluated an untested measure of the Talkabout programme called the TASS. Some important findings were identified in relation to a thorough description of the intervention and the role of self-awareness in social communication intervention. The systematic review identified a number of social skills measures which have been evaluated for their psychometric properties and would be recommended for use, and the final primary study provided a sufficiently robust measure which can be used to evaluate the target intervention. A thorough review in relation to available social skills measures provides an important synthesis of the available literature. The development of a UK based measure adds to the research gap due to the limited number of identified measures in the UK, and the increasing knowledge regarding the impact of social and emotional skills difficulties. Future directions highlighted include the evaluation of the target intervention using the newly developed measure and evaluation of the social validity of the target intervention using qualitative approaches.