Vineland Social Maturity Scale: An Update on Administration and Scoring

Vineland Social Maturity Scale (VSMS) has been one of the main psychological assessment tools for the evaluation of social and adaptive functions for several decades globally as well as in India. In addition to assessing social competence, VSMS is also used as a substitute test to assess intelligence when other core intelligence tests cannot be used due to various reasons, such as poor speech ability and in conditions where the child is not cooperative. The original version (Doll, 1953) was adapted to the Indian setting by A.J. Malin (1965) and later it saw further modification by Bharat Raj (1992). However, due to the extreme difficulty of obtaining the manuals, especially the Indian adapted, several errors have crept in over the years in its administration as well as scoring. Two important errors that need immediate attention of the professionals are the maximum possible Chronological Age (CA) to be considered and the way the final Social Age (SA) is calculated. In this regard, to help in arriving at a consensus across professionals, this article will discuss few of the important aspects in administration and scoring with appropriate examples.