Radical Approaches to Social Skills Training (Psychology Revivals)

Originally published in 1984, this book attempts a major re-assessment of social skills training. It examines the underlying paradigms, which are shown to be fundamentally behaviourist. Such paradigms, it is argued, severely constrain the aims and method of current types of training. Thus the book develops what is termed an ‘agency’ approach, based on man as a social agent who actively constructs his own experiences and generates his own goal-directed behaviour on the basis of those constructs. This new model is developed in both theoretical and practical ways in the main body of the book and should be of great interest to all those involved with social skills training.