Social skills in children and adolescents in residential care with collaborating families: relationship with their perceived social sup- port and life satisfaction

The Collaborating Families program allows children and adolescents in residential care to enjoy short periods of liv-ing together with other people and families. Despite the great benefit for these children and adolescents, research on family collaboration is very scarce. Given the importance of social development and its relationship to child and ad-olescent well-being, the main objective of this study is to evaluate the social skills of 37 children and adolescents be-tween 9 and 17 years of age in residential care, participants in the Collaborating Families program. The assessment was done from their own perspective and that of their 37 resi-dential caregivers. For this purpose, we used the Social Skills Improvement System (SSIS), which was administered both to the children and to their caregivers. The second objec-tive is to analyze the relationship between the self-perceived social skills of these children and their self-assessment of their sources of social support and of their life satisfaction. Our results showed that children perceived themselves to have greater social skills compared to the assessment of their caregivers. However, the mean scores of both informants were at the community average. A better self-perception of social skills was related to greater social support from the collaborating families, as well as to greater life satisfaction. Based on these results, the significant role of the collaborat-ing families in the development of these social skills is ev-idenced. Also, some practical implications for intervention in residential care and for the development of the family collaboration resource are discussed. Among them, we high-light the need to consider the vision and experience of the participating children and adolescents.