Changes in social,emotional,and behavioral skills are associated with changes in secondary school students’ important outcomes

Abstract

Evidence across the social sciences suggests the importance of social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills for a wide variety of youth outcomes. However, most of this work is cross-sectional. We know little about how patterns of change in adolescents’ SEB skills may be related to commensurate patterns of change in important outcomes across an academic year. Drawing from a sample of American secondary school students (N = 942), this longitudinal study employs latent change score models to fill that gap. We report four key findings. We find that (1) a short version of the Behavioral, Emotional, and Social Skills Inventory (BESSI) is psychometrically suitable for longitudinal analyses. We further find that (2) SEB skills are highly stable, on average, but also (3) characterized by significant between-person variation in change. Centrally, we find that (4) positive changes in SEB skills are related to changes in academic engagement, friendship quality, anxiety, depression, life satisfaction, as well as other measures of social and emotional competencies. Taken together, the results suggest that SEB skills are malleable, but future work is needed to identify patterns of change and develop and test targeted interventions.

Plain Language Summary

Why do some adolescents succeed? What can researchers, practitioners, and policymakers do to make sure that more can? One important part of success seems to be adolescents' social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills, which include things like leadership, stress management, empathy, organization, and creativity. There has been a great deal of work recently on these SEB skills, but we don't know much about how they change across an academic year, or if that change also predicts change in important outcomes in academics, social life, and adolescents' health. Filling those gaps was the aim of this study. We collected three questionnaires from a starting sample of 942 US American high school students. In that questionnaire, we asked them about their SEB skills, as well as important outcomes like their levels of anxiety, depression, academic engagement, and peer acceptance. We found that most adolescents SEB skills don't change much across an academic year. But some adolescents did improve in their SEB skills, and when they did, they also tended to improve in those important outcomes. These results give us more confidence that SEB skills can change and improve, and that helping students improve in their SEB skills could be an important part of helping them succeed.