Social competence refers to the ability to engage in meaningful interactions with others. It is a crucial skill potentially malleable to interventions. Nevertheless, it remains difficult to select which children, which periods in a child’s life, and which underlying skills form optimal targets for interventions. Development of social competence is complex to characterize because (a) it is by nature context- dependent; (b) it is subserved by multiple relevant processes that develop at different times in a child’s life; and (c) over the years multiple, possibly conflicting, ways have been coined to index a child’s social competence. The current paper elaborates upon a theoretical model of social competence developed by Rose-Krasnor (Rose- Krasnor, 1997; Rose-Krasnor and Denham, 2009), and it makes concrete how underlying skills and the variety of contexts of social interaction are both relevant dimensions of social competence that might change over development. It then illustrates how the cohorts and work packages in the Consortium on Individual Development each provide empirical contributions necessary for testing this model on the development of social competence.

社交能力是指与他人进行有意义的互动的能力。这是一项可能适用于干预措施的关键技能。然而，选择哪些儿童、儿童生命中的哪些阶段以及哪些基本技能构成最佳干预目标仍然很困难。社会能力的发展很难表征，因为 (a) 它本质上是依赖于环境的；(b) 它受到儿童一生中不同时期发展的多个相关过程的促进；(c) 多年来，人们创造了多种可能相互冲突的方法来衡量儿童的社交能力。当前的论文详细阐述了 Rose-Krasnor 开发的社交能力理论模型（Rose-Krasnor，1997；Rose-Krasnor 和 Denham，2009），并具体说明了基本技能和社交互动环境的多样性如何相关。可能随着发展而改变的社会能力维度。然后，它说明了个人发展联盟中的队列和工作包如何为测试该社会能力发展模型提供必要的经验贡献。