Social competence is a prominent concept in the development of interventions based on resiliency and in planning the delivery of social work services. Indeed, resilience is often defined as """"""""manifested competence"""""""" (Matsen & Coatsworth, 1998). Although many programs now emphasize the need to promote social competencies, little research has been conducted to identify the specific competencies that are needed most critically by particular populations under varying contexts. The purpose of this study is to begin development of an inventory of social competencies for Native American youth from different tribes in terms of their drug use and drug resistence strategies. Following a person-in environment and comparative conceptualization, a multi-stage methodology will be employed to identify drug-related tasks that are problematic for two tribal groups of Native American youth. These tasks will be transformed into representative problem scenarios, and the most salient scenarios for each group will be selected by Native American youth assessing their perceived frequency of occurrence, difficulty and importance. Next, the research team will solicit a range of possible responses to the problem scenarios, which will then be evaluated by Native American community experts, including youths, for social competency. The end product of this pilot study will be an inventory that empirically defines drug-related and other problem scenarios in the environments of Native American youth from two tribal communities and identifies the social competencies needed to address them.
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