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

Abstract

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.

Social, Emotional, and Behavioral Skills: An Integrative Model of the Skills Associated With Success During Adolescence and Across the Life Span

“…We have proposed that SEB skills can be organized in terms of five broad domains informed by the Big Five personality traits (Soto et al, 2021a), an organizational framework that we believe satisfies both conditions stipulated above. Relevant to the requirement of comprehensiveness, the Big Five provide a wide-ranging conceptual and empirical framework for studying human behavior.…”

“…To begin addressing the developmental interplay of skills and traits, as well as other critical questions, we have developed a conceptual and assessment framework of 32 specific SEB skills arrayed across five domains, and examined these skills' points of convergence and divergence with alternative models of strengths, competencies, and traits (Soto et al, 2021a;Soto et al, 2021b). Conceptually, the five domains of SEB skills we propose include:…”

“…To put this argument into practice and build on the conceptual model illustrated in Table 1 and Figure 1, our research team and an international group of colleagues has developed a broadband skills inventory based on our proposed five-domain model of SEB skills: the Behavioral, Emotional, and Social Skills Inventory (BESSI; Soto et al, 2021a). Across a series of seven samples of self-reports and observer-reports (N 6,309), we find that the BESSI provides reliable and valid assessment of SEB skill domains and facets.…”

“…We argue that these qualities are best understood as skills and not traits. We define SEB skills as a person's capacities to maintain social relationships, regulate emotions, and manage goal-and learning-directed behaviors (Soto et al, 2021a). Second, how can the wide range of SEB skills be taxonomized?…”

To Score or Not to Score? A Simulation Study on the Performance of Test Scores, Plausible Values, and SEM, in Regression With Socio-Emotional Skill or Personality Scales as Predictors

“…When aggregated to the Big Five, each dimension comprises 12 items (Soto and John, 2017). OECD's recent SSES (Kankaraš and Suarez-Alvarez, 2019) uses 8 items per facet/skill, the Values in Action Inventory (VIA; du Plessis and de Bruin, 2015) has 7-14 items per skill, and the new behavioral, social, and emotional skills inventory (BESSI; Soto et al, 2021) has 6 items for each of 32 skills.…”