Inventory of Supporting for Socio-Emotional Skills - Forced-Choice Version

Abstract

Socioemotional skills are essential for students’ development at school. However, school support has barely generated debates. We aimed to analyze the evidence of the internal structure and convergent-discriminant validity of the scores of the forced-choice version of the Inventory of Supporting for Socio-Emotional Skills (ISSE). In total, 443 middle and high school students (54% of whom were girls) participated in this study. Results indicated that the revised instrument was consistent with its two-dimension theoretical model (support and demand); the forced-choice version showed an appropriate internal structure and no bias by acquiescence. Moreover, based on a multitrait-multimethod matrix, the scores of the Likert forced-choice version showed convergent and discriminant validity. This study contributes to the literature by proposing a multidimensional heteroevalutive instrument to assess support for socioemotional development in the forced-choice format, which reduces response bias.