The field of the social competence and social skills evaluation are permeated of contradictory results, largely associated to the use, in many studies, of different indexes, informers and concepts. Given the relevance and relative scarcity of studies on that subject, in particular about children's self-evaluation, the present paper aims to compare differences and similarities, in some psychometric properties associated to two indicators - frequency and difficulty of skilled social reactions - obtained with a Multimedia Social Skills Inventoire for Children (MUSSIC-Del-Prette). MUSSIC-Del-Prette was applied initially to 406 children of 7 a 13 years old (medium=8), of both sexes, with different degrees of learning difficulty and retested, one month later with 191 (47%) students from that sample. The results were more favorable to the difficulty index than to frequency in some aspects analyzed in this study: more symmetrical scores distribution, larger internal consistency, better correlation between test and re-test, bigger discrimination items-scores, contemplating positive and negative demands in the items of larger discrimination and a differentiated factorial structure (four instead of three factors). It is discussed the methodological and practical implications of those results as well as new research directions.
Social skills training; multimedia; psychometrics
