The aim was to investigate whether social skills’ training (SST) influences attitudes towards communication skills learning and to validate the Communication Skills Attitudes Scale (CSAS) among students of health studies in the Republic of Croatia. SST (10 workshops) was implemented for this purpose. Seventy 1st year students in four Croatian university health studies were randomly selected to take part in the training and 169 students were part of the control group. CSAS was administered at the beginning and end of training to both groups. The results indicated good metric characteristics in relation to CSAS and its two-factor structure (positive attitude scale and negative attitude scale). Furthermore, we did not record significant changes in attitudes towards communication skills learning in both groups. However, pursuant to average results from the subscales attitudes towards communication skills learning, we noticed that negative attitudes tend to decrease and positive tend to increase. This indicates that 10 workshops might have been insufficient in order to change attitudes.

validation, communication and social skills, training