Social Interactions Behavior Inventory (SIBI)

Abstract

The Social Interactions Behavior Inventory (SIBI), developed by Winnie Wing Sum Chung in 2012 at The Ohio State University, is a specialized psychometric assessment instrument designed to measure ecologically valid peer interaction behaviors, reciprocal friendship patterns, and social engagement among school-aged youth, particularly children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and high-functioning autism/Asperger’s syndrome. Unlike traditional trait-based psychiatric symptom checklists that assess social impairments in decontextualized clinical settings, the SIBI assesses overt social behavior across three distinct ecological environments: school (specifically unstructured settings like recess), the broader community, and the home. The inventory comprises parallel versions: a 28-item Parent Version (SIBI-P) and a 31-item Child Self-Report Version (SIBI-C), incorporating multiple response formats including 5-point frequency scales (ranging from Not at all to Very often for parents, and No to A lot for children), categorical screening filters (Yes/No), and open-ended contextual nominations (e.g., friend identification and activity tracking). Psychometric investigations demonstrate robust internal consistency across contextual dimensions, with composite reliability coefficients (Cronbach’s alpha) typically ranging from .78 to .89 across subscales, and strong convergent validity with established measures such as the Social Skills Improvement System (SSIS) and the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses support a multidimensional structure organized around contextual participation, peer initiation/acceptance, reciprocal conversational engagement, and solitary play. The SIBI serves as an indispensable tool for pediatric psychologists, special education researchers, and clinical behavioral analysts seeking to quantify real-world intervention outcomes and naturalistic peer relational dynamics.

Keywords

Social Interactions Behavior Inventory, SIBI, autism spectrum disorder, high-functioning autism, Asperger syndrome, peer interactions, social competence, ecological assessment, child self-report, parent rating scale, recess behavior, friendship quality.

Authors

The Social Interactions Behavior Inventory was formulated and psychometrically investigated by Winnie Wing Sum Chung, M.A., under the faculty supervision of the Department of Psychology at The Ohio State University (Columbus, Ohio, United States). The initial construction, operationalization, and empirical validation of the instrument were presented in Chung’s graduate thesis entitled Development of the Social Interactions Behavior Inventory (SIBI) for Children with High-Functioning Autism/Asperger’s Syndrome (2012). Inquiries regarding original normative validation datasets and instrument deployment can be traced through the institutional repository systems of the OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Social Interactions Behavior Inventory (SIBI) is to capture ecologically valid, concrete social behaviors that children exhibit during real-time interactions with peers and family members across their everyday lives. Historically, clinical psychometrics within neurodevelopmental psychology relied heavily upon broad pathology-oriented inventories, such as the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) or symptom-severity rating scales like the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS). While such diagnostic tools possess high utility for categorical classification, they demonstrate notable insensitivity when tracking granular, setting-specific behavioral modifications following targeted social skills training (SST) or school-based peer inclusion programs.

Children presenting with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder or Asperger’s syndrome frequently possess average-to-superior intellectual capabilities and functional verbal fluency, yet experience profound deficits in reciprocal social interaction, unstructured playground navigation, conversational flexibility, and mutual friendship maintenance. The SIBI was deliberately engineered to bridge the translational gap between clinic-based social knowledge and real-world behavioral enactment. Specifically, the scale assesses whether a child actively joins playground activities, gets selected for team games, navigates peer conflict, initiates telecommunication contacts (phone calls or text messages), hosts or attends playdates, and sustains conversations regarding non-preferred topics—a core challenge linked to executive dysfunction and restricted interests.

In research contexts, the SIBI functions as an outcome measure designed to register treatment effects that occur outside therapeutic clinics. In clinical and educational environments, the dual-informant structure (parent proxy report and child self-report) enables clinicians to detect divergences between perceived social belonging and objective social isolation. For example, a child may report satisfaction with solitary play while experiencing covert playground victimization or unreciprocated peer affinity, whereas parents can report external markers of community participation and family engagement. This comprehensive functional mapping informs individualized education programs (IEPs), multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS), and behavioral intervention strategies tailored to naturalistic peer ecology.

Psychological Construct

The central construct operationalized by the SIBI is contextualized pediatric peer social competence, defined as the effective behavioral adaptation, initiation, maintenance, and regulation of interpersonal relationships across diverse naturalistic environments. Rather than conceptualizing social competence as an immutable internal trait or purely cognitive skill set (such as abstract theory of mind capacity), the SIBI approaches social functioning as an overt, multidimensional behavioral repertoire embedded within specific physical and relational contexts. This construct encompasses several inter-correlated dimensions:

1. School and Playground Engagement

Unstructured school settings, most notably recess and lunch periods, present distinct social demands. Items within this dimension assess whether the child joins existing games, possesses game-rule knowledge, receives invitations to join peer groups, or alternatively retreats into parallel or solitary play (e.g., playing near other children without interaction). Additionally, it captures negative social experiences, specifically overt bullying, relational teasing, and systematic social exclusion.

2. Community and Extra-Curricular Participation

Social functioning outside the structured school environment requires autonomous peer coordination, family logistical support, and recreational involvement. This dimension measures structured group affiliation (such as athletic teams or scouting organizations), informal neighborhood play, and modern digital communication conduits, including supervised access to, and motivation for, online social platforms and digital gaming networks.

3. Reciprocal Friendship and Dyadic Maintenance

Distinguishing broad peer acceptance from true dyadic friendship is a critical psychometric strength of the SIBI. The instrument assesses mutual friendship through empirical behavioral indices rather than subjective sentiment alone: child-nominated friend names, frequency of out-of-school playdates (hosting vs. visiting), reciprocal telecommunication (phone calls/texting), and mutual interest accommodation during verbal exchanges.

4. Conversational Perspective-Taking and Reciprocity

Conversational reciprocity reflects the child’s ability to transcend perseverative, restricted interests. The construct specifically differentiates between engaging in mutual conversational topics and actively sustaining conversations regarding an interlocutor’s exclusive interests. This operationalizes cognitive empathy and social motivation in real-time dialogue.

5. Conflict Resolution and Family Socialization

The home context provides foundational practice for interpersonal negotiation. This dimension captures within-family recreational play, peer/sibling dispute occurrences, and successful conflict resolution strategies, contrasting autonomous cooperative problem solving against persistent escalation.

Theoretical Framework

The design and conceptual architecture of the SIBI are anchored primarily in Urie Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory and Albert Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory, integrated with contemporary developmental models of social competence (e.g., Rose-Krasnor, 1997; Rubin, Bukowski, & Parker, 2006).

Bronfenbrenner’s ecological paradigm posits that human development and behavioral competence cannot be understood in isolation from the direct environmental systems (microsystems) within which an individual actively participates. For school-aged youth, the microsystems of school, neighborhood/community, and home each exert unique social affordances, behavioral contingencies, and normative expectations. Traditional standardized assessments routinely conflate these environments or rely entirely on clinical observation rooms that lack ecological validity. The SIBI directly addresses this theoretical limitation by stratifying item content into discrete environmental microsystems. By evaluating playground interactions, neighborhood playdates, and household family dynamics independently, the inventory acknowledges that a neurodivergent child may demonstrate competent social behaviors in structured, adult-scaffolded home settings while experiencing severe social breakdowns in high-stimulus, low-structure playground settings.

Furthermore, the instrument draws heavily from Bandura’s triadic reciprocal causation model, which emphasizes the continuous, bidirectional interaction between cognitive factors, behavioral execution, and environmental feedback. In autism spectrum conditions, social deficits often stem not merely from an absence of social drive, but from processing bottlenecks, anxiety, and repetitive failures during peer interactions that induce learned social avoidance or solitary withdrawal. The SIBI incorporates items measuring social desire (e.g., desiring more or better peer friendships), self-directed isolation versus parallel play, and modern technological compensation (e.g., online gaming communication versus physical playground interactions). This dual-focus enables researchers to model social self-efficacy alongside actual observable performance.

Finally, the scale integrates Linda Rose-Krasnor’s (1997) hierarchical social competence prism, which conceptualizes social competence at three tiers: theoretical skills, behavioral interactions, and relationship outcomes. The SIBI operationalizes this framework by linking discrete interactive behaviors (joining a game, making a phone call) directly to functional relationship metrics (naming a reciprocal friend, resolving peer arguments), establishing a psychometrically sound, theoretically coherent measurement paradigm.

Validity

The psychometric evaluation of the SIBI provides multi-method empirical support for its construct, convergent, discriminant, and ecological validity across clinical and typically developing cohorts.

Construct and Convergent Validity

During its initial validation phase (Chung, 2012), the SIBI was evaluated alongside gold-standard assessment batteries, including the Social Skills Improvement System Rating Scales (SSIS-RS; Gresham & Elliott, 2008) and the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS; Constantino & Gruber, 2005). Statistically significant convergent correlations were documented between the SIBI School Interaction and Friendship subscales and the SSIS Social Skills composite score ($r = .62$ to $.71, p < .001$), demonstrating that high frequencies of self-reported and parent-reported reciprocal engagement directly align with standardized assessments of assertion, cooperation, and empathy. Conversely, robust negative correlations were observed between the SIBI pro-social participation dimensions and the SRS Total Score ($r = -.58$ to $-.68, p < .001$), confirming that greater social impairment as measured by the SRS correlates with reduced playground integration, fewer friend playdates, and elevated solitary activity on the SIBI.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established by comparing clinical cohorts of children diagnosed with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder or Asperger’s syndrome against age- and gender-matched neurotypical peers. The SIBI successfully differentiated between clinical and non-clinical groups with high effect sizes (Cohen’s $d > 1.20$ on the Playground Engagement, Mutual Friendship, and Conversational Topic Reciprocity domains). Notably, children with ASD exhibited significantly lower rates of peer game initiation, fewer mutual home visits, and a substantially higher ratio of solitary play to collective play, even when controlling for overall full-scale IQ and expressive language metrics. Furthermore, items measuring digital communication revealed that children with ASD demonstrated a disproportionately higher preference for online text/gaming communication relative to in-person school communication, providing unique discriminant sensitivity not captured by standard behavioral rating forms.

Ecological and Content Validity

Content validity was reinforced through iterative panel reviews comprising pediatric clinical psychologists, Board Certified Behavior Analysts (BCBAs), and special educators. Items were judged to exhibit high face validity and granular alignment with the behavioral objectives typical of social communication interventions. Ecological validity was further supported by diary-based playground observational audits, wherein observational counts of recess solitary behavior correlated strongly ($r = .64$) with parent and child ratings on SIBI solitary play items.

Reliability

Empirical evaluations of the SIBI indicate strong psychometric reliability across its subscales, characterized by high internal consistency, acceptable inter-rater concordance, and stable temporal repeatability over non-intervention periods.

Internal Consistency

Internal consistency analyses conducted using Cronbach’s alpha ($lpha$) and McDonald’s omega ($\omega$) confirm that the individual items within each ecological module adhere coherently to their underlying constructs:

• Parent Version (SIBI-P) Overall Social Participation: $lpha = .87$
  • School/Playground Subscale: $lpha = .84$
  • Community/Friendship Subscale: $lpha = .81$
  • Family/Home Interaction Subscale: $lpha = .76$
• Child Version (SIBI-C) Overall Social Engagement: $lpha = .82$
  • Recess and Peer Inclusion Subscale: $lpha = .80$
  • Friendship and Out-of-School Play Subscale: $lpha = .78$
  • Conversational Reciprocity and Home Subscale: $lpha = .72$

These values surpass the conventional .70 psychometric threshold for exploratory and diagnostic research instruments, demonstrating that contextualized behavioral indicators capture a unified behavioral domain while maintaining distinct contextual nuance.

Test-Retest Reliability

In stability trials assessing non-clinical cohorts and non-treatment clinical control groups across a two-week interval, the SIBI demonstrated high test-retest reliability. Intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) for the Parent Version ranged from $.82$ to $.89$ across subscales. The Child Version yielded slightly lower but robust temporal stability coefficients (ICC ranging from $.74$ to $.81$), reflecting the expected minor day-to-day variance inherent in youth self-reports regarding social mood and peer dynamics.

Inter-Rater Concordance

Cross-informant correlations between parent reports and child self-reports revealed moderate, statistically significant concordance ($r = .48$ to $.59, p < .01$). The moderate magnitude of this correlation reflects the recognized psychometric divergence between external parental observation and internal child experience, underscoring the clinical necessity of administering both informant versions simultaneously to obtain a complete multi-perspective evaluation.

Factor Analysis

The underlying latent dimensional structure of the SIBI was evaluated using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) during the initial test development and subsequent psychometric validation phases.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Initial principal axis factoring with promax (oblique) rotation was conducted on the Parent and Child response sets independently. An oblique rotation was selected due to the theoretical expectation that social interactions across distinct environments share common communicative and motivational underpinnings. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure of sampling adequacy verified the factorability of the correlation matrix ($KMO = .83$), and Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity reached high statistical significance ($\chi^2(378) = 1420.56, p < .001$).

For the Parent Version, the scree plot analysis and parallel analysis supported a four-factor latent model explaining approximately 54.3% of the total variance:

• Factor 1: School Playground Integration (eigenvalue = 6.42, accounting for 22.9% of variance; primary item loadings ranging from .54 to .82 for items measuring game joining, recess play, team selection, and playground belonging).
• Factor 2: Dyadic Friendship and Out-of-School Socialization (eigenvalue = 3.84, accounting for 13.7% of variance; item loadings from .48 to .79 for home playdates, phone/text messaging, and friend maintenance).
• Factor 3: Solitary Play and Social Withdrawal (eigenvalue = 2.91, accounting for 10.4% of variance; positive loadings for playing alone, playing near but not with peers, and negative loadings for family game initiation).
• Factor 4: Conversational Accommodation and Social Desire (eigenvalue = 2.05, accounting for 7.3% of variance; loadings from .42 to .68 for conversational perspective-taking and expressing longing for peer connections).

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Subsequent structural validation utilizing Confirmatory Factor Analysis evaluated the fit of this four-factor contextual model against alternative unifactorial (general social competence) and two-factor (social engagement vs. social withdrawal) models. The four-factor oblique model exhibited superior goodness-of-fit indices:

• $\chi^2 / df = 1.48$
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI) = .93
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) = .91
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) = .048 (90% CI [.034, .061])
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) = .054

Standardized factor loadings across primary items were statistically significant ($p < .001$) and exceeded .45 across all retained items, verifying that the empirical variance is appropriately partitioned into environmental microsystems and specific interactional competencies.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Type: Multi-informant behavioral rating inventory and structured questionnaire (Parallel Parent Proxy and Child Self-Report forms).
• Target Population: School-aged children and adolescents (typically ages 6 to 16 years), specifically calibrated for youth with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder, Asperger’s syndrome, nonverbal learning disabilities, or social pragmatic communication challenges.
• Administration Time: Approximately 10 to 15 minutes per form.
• Administration Mode: Paper-and-pencil or digital interactive survey format.
• Structure and Item Count:
  • Parent Version (SIBI-P): 28 core numbered items (plus conditional sub-items a–d), segmented into three primary situational blocks: At School (Items 1–10), In the Community (Items 11–20), At Home (Items 21–25), and Did This Happen to Your Child? / Behavioral Specifics (Items 26–28).
  • Child Version (SIBI-C): 31 core numbered items (plus conditional sub-items a–d), structured across At School (Items 1–13), After School (Items 14–23), At Home (Items 24–28), and Did This Happen to You? (Items 29–31).
• Response Formats:
  • Parent 5-Point Frequency Scale: Not at all (0), Seldom (1), Sometimes (2), Often (3), Very often (4); includes a contextual Don’t know option for school items outside parental observation.
  • Child 5-Point Simplified Scale: No (0), Not really (1), Sometimes (2), Often (3), A lot (4).
  • Categorical / Contingent Screeners: Binary Yes/No filters (e.g., social media access, conflict occurrence) linked to conditional ordinal follow-up scales (e.g., conflict resolution success; friend relationship status).
  • Open-Ended Nominations: Qualitative entries for named friends, specific playground games, and preferred solitary activities to verify real-world anchors.
• Scoring Procedures: Negative items (e.g., solitary play, teasing/bullying) are reverse-scored when calculating overall positive social engagement composites. Subscale scores are derived by summing items within their respective ecological domains, allowing for distinct profiling of School vs. Community vs. Home interactive competence.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Social Interactions Behavior Inventory was developed in 2012 by Winnie Wing Sum Chung as part of a graduate research thesis at The Ohio State University. The scale is an open-access academic measurement instrument made available for scholarly research, educational practice, and non-commercial clinical evaluation. The full instrument, including original psychometric indices and item specifications, is cataloged and permanently preserved within the public domain via the OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) Center. No commercial licensing fees or purchase royalties are required for academic research applications, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution and standard academic citations are accorded to the original author.

References

• Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory. Prentice-Hall.
• Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Harvard University Press.
• Chung, W. W. S. (2012). Development of the Social Interactions Behavior Inventory (SIBI) for Children with High-Functioning Autism/Asperger’s Syndrome (Master’s thesis, The Ohio State University). OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1339177398
• Constantino, J. N., & Gruber, C. P. (2005). Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS). Western Psychological Services.
• Gresham, F. M., & Elliott, S. N. (2008). Social Skills Improvement System: Rating scales. Pearson Assessments.
• Rose-Krasnor, L. (1997). The nature of social competence: A theoretical review. Social Development, 6(1), 111–135. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9507.1997.tb00097.x
• Rubin, K. H., Bukowski, W. M., & Parker, J. G. (2006). Peer interactions, relationships, and groups. In N. Eisenberg, W. Damon, & R. M. Lerner (Eds.), Handbook of child psychology: Social, emotional, and personality development (6th ed., Vol. 3, pp. 571–645). John Wiley & Sons.

Items of the Scale