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

Abstract

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.

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

“…Second, it has a robust multidimensional structure and exhibits conceptually coherent convergence and divergence from the Big Five and other socioemotional skill measures (Soto et al, 2022a(Soto et al, , 2022b. Finally, the BESSI-192 provides incremental validity over personality traits when predicting outcomes and observed behavior (Breil et al, 2022;Soto et al, 2022bSoto et al, , 2023Yoon et al, 2024).…”

Validation of the self-applicable version of the Resilience Subscale of the BESSI-45 Inventory in Peruvian adolescents aged 12 to 17 years

“…Los ítems más importantes de la subescala, considerando sus valores de discriminación y sus cargas factoriales, son los relacionados al control de la cólera e impulsividad («Controlo mi carácter», «Me controlo cuando me estoy enfadando» y «Controlo mis impulsos antes de actuar»). Esto difiere del estudio de construcción del BESSI, donde la faceta más relacionada con el dominio de resiliencia emocional fue la regulación del estrés (7), por lo cual fue tomada como representante de dicho dominio en una investigación sobre habilidades sociales, emocionales y conductuales como predictores de los logros académicos (28).…”