Conversational Skills of Inpatient Conduct-Disordered Youths

Abstract
The conversational skills of 24 inpatient conduct-disordered youths and 32 "normal" youths from the community were assessed and compared. A panel of 12 peer judges provided global ratings of subjects' conversational skill. Moderate to high amounts of the variance in the peer ratings were accounted for by conversational-skill component behaviors, especially for the inpatient conduct disordered youths. Compared to the nonpatient youths, the inpatient youths were significantly deficient in their use of a variety of conversational-skill component behaviors and received significantly lower peer ratings of conversational skill. Implications of the findings for social-skills training and research are discussed.