Efficacy of Social Skills Training in Schizophrenia: A Nursing Review

Background and Aim: Social skills training, a psychological approach, is used to ameliorate the deficits in social skills among patients with a severe mental illness. For the efficacy of social skills training in... [ view full abstract ]

Background and Aim:

Social skills training, a psychological approach, is used to ameliorate the deficits in social skills among patients with a severe mental illness. For the efficacy of social skills training in schizophrenia, the literature in other core psychiatric disciplines (i.e. psychology, psychiatry, etc) indicates some conflicting evidences and a limited quality of evidence in psychiatric nursing. With the exemption of a few individual nursing studies, no systematic review is available to date in psychiatric nursing literature.This systematic review of literature was undertaken to explore the efficacy of social skills training in schizophrenia.

Search and Review Methods:

Relevant studies on the topic were searched (period covering January 1991 to October 2013) in both electronic databases and manual sources. Twenty nine experimental studies including five from nursing discipline involving adult patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia were included. The author critically reviewed them for their methodological quality and narratives of main findings. The important methodological aspects and narratives of main findings of reviewed studies were presented into matrix tables.

Findings:

Results of several studies of other core psychiatric disciplines had indicated that social skills training interventions significantly increase the participants’ knowledge of text and performance about taught skills, improve their social adjustment and decrease their negative symptoms that are associated with social dysfunctions. Similarly, most existing nursing studies had shown the efficacy of basic conversational and assertiveness skills training as nursing interventions particularly in terms of a significant gain in participants’ conversational skills, social interaction and assertiveness abilities, self-esteem and a significant reduction in their social anxiety and negative symptoms.

Conclusions and Implications:

Social skill training is a beneficial and feasible therapeutic nursing intervention and should be implemented in routine care. However, the nursing role as social skills trainer needs to be developed through facilitating short-term workshops. In designing and implementing SST as a nursing intervention with small group of patients, the individual patient’s characteristics, impairments and needs should be taken into account. Future systematic reviews should include meta-analyses of nursing studies for more precise and reliable results regarding efficacy of SST as nursing interventions.