Practice Goals
Targeted (Selected and Indicated) School-Based Social Information-Processing Interventions are violence prevention programs that aim to improve one or more aspects of students’ social information-processing difficulties. Targeted prevention involves directing prevention efforts toward particular students who are at risk for aggressive or violent behavior, or who are already exhibiting these behaviors. Social information processing refers to how individuals (in this case, children) interpret and process social situations. It is believed that children with aggression fail to process the information received from peers and others during social interactions, which leads to aggressive behavior (Dodge and Crick 1990).
Overall, the goal of these interventions is to improve the social behavior of these targeted school-aged children, and thereby reduce their negative behaviors (such as aggression and violent behavior) that are thought to be the result of cognitive deficits in social information processing (Wilson and Lipsey 2006).
Practice Components
Social information-processing programs can be distinguished by three characteristics:
- The program includes training in at least one of the social information-processing steps: 1) encoding situational and internal cues, 2) interpreting the situational and internal cues, 3) choosing or clarifying a goal, 4) producing or accessing possible responses to meet the chosen goal, 5) selecting a response, and 6) executing the behavior.
- Rather than targeting specific behavioral skills, the program emphasizes cognitive–thinking skills. Through teaching students cognitive and thinking skills, social information-processing interventions aim to improve a student’s ability to process information in a variety of social situations.
- The program includes structured tasks and activities to teach cognitive skills to the students. Students then have the opportunity to apply the skills to actual social situations.
It is important to distinguish social information-processing programs from interventions with similar features. For example, interventions that target behavioral–social skills are different from social information-processing interventions in that the behavioral–social skills interventions focus on social or antisocial behaviors, whereas social information-processing programs focus on the underlying cognitive processes. Similarly, social information-processing interventions are different from other cognitively oriented programs in that the cognitive programs focus on thinking skills, but do not focus on the interpersonal relationships, which is a defining feature of social information processing.
Target Population
In contrast to universal prevention programs, selected and indicated interventions target particular students. Selected interventions are delivered to students who are selected as a result of the presence of some risk factor that is believed to be associated with later aggressive or violent behavior. Indicated interventions also involve targeting particular students, but involve students who already exhibit the aggressive or violent behavior. Although these interventions are delivered at school during regular school hours, they are typically delivered outside of the classroom and may involve individual sessions or group sessions.
Practice Theory
Targeted social information-processing interventions are grounded in the social information-processing model, which holds that children experience a social situation as a result of their biological dispositions and memories from past experiences. Children receive input from the social situation, and their behavioral responses are the result of processing this input (Crick and Dodge 1994). According to the model, input is processed through the six social information-processing steps (described above). It is believed that a deficiency in one of the six interrelated steps produces negative social behaviors such as aggression. The theory further argues that aggressive children and nonaggressive children differ in their abilities to process social information (Wilson and Lipsey 2006).
