Assessing Social, Emotional, and Behavioral Skills in Just a Few Minutes: 96-, 45-, and 20-Item Short Forms of the BESSI.

Social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills matter for individuals' well-being and success. The behavioral, emotional, and social skills inventory (BESSI) uses 192 items to assess 32 specific SEB skills across five broad skill domains. This research developed three short forms of the BESSI-192 and explored their measurement properties, predictive validity, and cross-cultural comparability. We found that BESSI-96, BESSI-45, and BESSI-20 largely captured the psychological content of the BESSI-192 measure, retained a robust multidimensional structure, and demonstrated adequate reliability. At the domain and facet level, the BESSI short forms showed patterns of associations with external criteria that were similar to the BESSI-192 and preserved most of the BESSI-192's predictive power. The BESSI short forms also demonstrated full or partial measurement invariance between the primarily U.S.-based and German adult samples. We conclude by discussing contexts in which the short forms may be useful for researchers and practitioners.

Examining SEB skills' incremental validity over personality traits in predicting academic achievement.

Personality traits and social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills share the same behavioral referents, but whereas traits refer to a person's typical or average performance, skills refer to their capacity or maximal performance. Given their shared behavioral foundations, an important question to address is whether personality traits and SEB skills independently predict important outcomes. In this study (N = 642), we examined whether subscales of the Behavioral, Emotional, and Social Skills Inventory (BESSI), a measure of SEB skills, provided incremental validity in the prediction of the ACT composite score, an important academic outcome for American adolescents, over the Big Five personality traits. Consistent with our expectations, on average, SEB skills showed stronger associations with ACT achievement scores than personality traits. Moreover, SEB skills added incremental validity over and above personality traits in predicting ACT achievement scores. The findings reinforce the importance of conceptually distinguishing and measuring traits and skills.

The social, emotional, and behavioral skill antecedents to college students' volunteering during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The disruptions to community functioning caused by the COVID-19 pandemic spurred individuals to action. This empirical study investigated the social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skill antecedents to college students' volunteering during the COVID-19 pandemic (N = 248, Mage = 20.6). We assessed eight SEB skills at the onset of a volunteering program, and students' volunteer hours were assessed 10-weeks later. Approximately 41.5% of the sample did not complete any volunteer hours. Higher levels of perspective taking skill, abstract thinking skill, and stress regulation were associated with more time spent volunteering. These results suggest that strength in particular SEB skills can prospectively predict prosocial civic behaviors.

An integrative framework for conceptualizing and assessing social, emotional, and behavioral skills: The BESSI.

People differ in their social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills: their capacities to maintain social relationships, regulate emotions, and manage goal- and learning-directed behaviors. In five studies using data from seven independent samples (N = 6,309), we address three key questions about the nature, structure, assessment, and outcomes of SEB skills. First, how can SEB skills be defined and distinguished from other kinds of psychological constructs, such as personality traits? We propose that SEB skills represent how someone is capable of thinking, feeling, and behaving when the situation calls for it, whereas traits represent how someone tends to think, feel, and behave averaged across situations. Second, how can specific SEB skills be organized within broader domains? We find that many skill facets can be organized within five major domains representing Social Engagement, Cooperation, Self-Management, Emotional Resilience, and Innovation Skills. Third, how should SEB skills be measured? We develop and validate the Behavioral, Emotional, and Social Skills Inventory (BESSI) to measure individuals' capacity to enact specific behaviors representing 32 skill facets. We then use the BESSI to investigate the nomological network of SEB skills. We show that both skill domains and facets converge in conceptually meaningful ways with socioemotional competencies, character and developmental strengths, and personality traits, and predict consequential outcomes including academic achievement and engagement, occupational interests, social relationships, and well-being. We believe that this work provides the most comprehensive model currently available for conceptualizing SEB skills, as well as the most psychometrically robust tool available for assessing them. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Survey data of social, emotional, and behavioral skills among seven independent samples.

The data presented in this article- originally reported by Soto and colleagues (Soto et al., in press)- assess social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills, indexed by the Behavioral, Emotional, and Social Skills Inventory (BESSI), across seven independent samples (N = 6,309). Four of the datasets (N = 5000) were collected using an online survey housed on PersonalityLab.org. In two of these internet datasets, participants provided their responses to sociodemographic items, subsets of BESSI items (45 - 102 items), and the Big Five Inventory-2 (BFI-2, 60 items). In the other two internet datasets, participants answered the same sociodemographic items and the full BESSI questionnaire (192 - 200 items). The fifth dataset was collected via an online survey sponsored by the Character Lab Research Network and included responses from 499 high school students. The High School Student Sample completed sociodemographic items, the full BESSI (192 items), and measures of academic engagement, occupational interests, peer acceptance, friendship quality, romantic relationship satisfaction, family relationship satisfaction, volunteerism, physical exercise, and life satisfaction (96 total items). The sixth dataset was collected using the Qualtrics Online Sample service, and 488 adult respondents completed an extended, observer-report version of the BESSI (284 items), sociodemographic items, and information regarding their relationship with the person whom they were reporting on (7 items). The seventh data set consisted of college students (N = 322) from Colby College. The College Student Sample completed a survey on Qualtrics that included sociodemographic items, the full BESSI (192 items), the BFI-2 (60 items), and four other SEB skill inventories (116 items). All datasets, questionnaires, and scoring forms are hosted on OSF. The data can be used to (1) understand the structure and organization of SEB skills, (2) model the relationship between SEB skills and conceptually adjacent constructs such as personality traits and character strengths, and (3) explore the associations between SEB skills and consequential outcomes.