This paper focuses on the tension between normative demands on social behavior of adolescents on the one hand and their actual behavior in social conflict situations on the other hand. We present an empirical-based typology for dealing with conflicts as part of social competence. Within a survey study students of the fifth to sixth grade with lower socio-economic status were asked to evaluate conflicts which are based on social values. 

Social competence is linked to successful participation in society: The OECD identified the ability to interact in heterogeneous groups as key competence in the early 2000s (OECD, 2005) as well as the European Reference Framework addresses social competence as essential for lifelong learning (European Union, 2018). From this perspective social competence involves more than intra- and interpersonal knowledge and skills: there is a need to include societal values and norms as a benchmark for what is considered to be socially competent. Ten Dam and Volman (2007) refer to this as ‘citizenship perspective’ on social competence. However, social competence is mostly conceptualised from a psychological viewpoint: For instance, developmental psychology focuses on its role for children and adolescents’ fulfillment of developmental tasks (Englund et al., 2000) and clinical psychology aims attention at the promotion of social competence for children and adolescents with disorders (DuBois et al., 2003). All these approaches take mainly the individual into account. Although some approaches include values as relevant for providing direction for social behaviour (e.g. Rose-Krasnor, 1997), the societal dimension is neglected when it comes to measuring social competence. Instead, instruments tend to focus on single dispositions (e.g. perspective taking or empathy) only.

In this paper a value-based approach to social competence is chosen. We conceptualise social competence as the ability to solve problems in differing social contexts in a way that meets demands made by a democratic society. Thus, social competence is understood as complex action competence. This understanding is based on Roth's (1971) ideal, normative and complex goals of education. He associates social competence with responsibility which includes “ the ability to act and judge, and hold responsible, in professional or social areas that are relevant in social, societal or political terms” (Original: Roth, 1971, p.180, translation by Klieme et al., 2008, p. 6). Recent research work also takes up this normative approach (Kühn, 2020). Considering this theoretical framework as well as that social competence “concerns the interaction between an individual and others” (ten Dam & Volman, 2007, p. 283), our study addresses the research question how adolescents evaluate possible reactions to conflicts between at least two peers. Our focus is on young adolescents with lower levels of education: As Grundmann et al. (2016) argue, children and adolescents from families with lower socioeconomic status tend to carry out educational practises which lead to diverging ways of discussing conflicts and reflecting them compared to children from families with higher socioeconomic and educational status. As a consequence, from a social justice perspective it is important to avoid a deficit-oriented view on this group. Instead, it is necessary to choose an approach which gives more insights into the quality of disadvantaged young adolescents’ actions by identifying typical conflict behaviour patterns. With reference to Klieme’s (2004) suggestion that it might not be possible to measure definite levels of complex competences such as social competence, we propose an empirical-based typology.

For the present survey 1837 fifth- and sixth-graders from 21 schools in the German Ruhr area answered a questionnaire in summer 2019. Based on the location of the different schools and the included types of schools (Haupt-, Real-, Sekundar- and Gesamtschule) it can be concluded that the students have a lower socioeconomic status and are partially at risk of educational poverty. As no existing instrument could be identified meeting the needs of the specific sample (young age, partially low reading skills) on the one hand and the criteria derived from theoretical considerations (value-based, context-sensitive) on the other hand, a questionnaire called WEGE-SK was specifically developed. WEGE-SK follows the principles of a paper-pencil Situational Judgement Test (SJT) (Lievens, Peeters & Schollaert, 2008). Thus, the students were asked to evaluate different reactions towards conflict situations. In order to operationalise basic ideas of democratic societies as a benchmark for social competence, articles from The Human Rights Act were grouped into five values. Each of the 15 conflict situations addresses one of the values (e.g. protection from discrimination or respect for privacy) in a way that is close to young adolescents’ realm of experience. Furthermore, each situation is presented as a comic with limited text in order to make it easy to understand. The classification of eight reactions towards the conflict situations were developed with reference to research on coping-strategies and conflict resolution strategies (Laursen, Finkelstein & Townsend Betts, 2001; Reijntjes, Steggea & Terwogt, 2006; Enders, 2014) and validated in a pre-test.The students rated each reaction on a five-point likert-scale. In accordance with the above mentioned aim to build a typology, we performed a cluster analysis using Ward method of minimum variance (Wierzchoń & Kłopotek, 2018).

Using a cluster analysis, we were able to identify six different types of young adolescents who diverge in the way they deal with social conflict situations. The attributes in which the types differ comprise the extent to which a value orientation is shown, inhowfar an immediate willingness to act in favour of a societal value exists and finally the extent to which the reactions employed are appropriate. For example, the largest cluster (30,7% of all students) consists of students who obviously have knowledge about values and norms, but show a low willingness to actively apply them themselves and engage in conflicts. We call this group the reticent ones. In contrast, the so-called law enforcers (10,2% of all students) show high agreement with the punishment of value-violating behaviour by authorities as well as in their willingness to take the law into their own hands by punishing others. In this contribution, we present the whole typology and contrast the six clusters with respect to the aforementioned characteristics as well as gender and type of school. The results will be discussed in light of the citizenship perspective of social competence (Ten Dam and Volman, 2007). To conclude, we discuss pedagogical recommendations based on these results.

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