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.
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CEKLJ, FFLJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PEFLJ
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 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, 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.
The present research addresses three key questions about social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills. First, how do SEB skills relate with the Big Five traits and Collaborative for Academic, ...Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) core competencies? Second, how do SEB skills relate with consequential outcomes in adolescence? Third, do SEB skills provide incremental validity beyond personality traits? Results from a diverse sample of high school students (N = 897) indicate that SEB skills converge with the Big Five traits and CASEL competencies in expected and conceptually meaningful ways. Analyses of self-reported and school-reported outcomes extend SEB skills’ nomological network by showing that they predict academic achievement and engagement, occupational interests, social relationships, civic engagement, and well-being. Finally, tests of incremental validity indicate that SEB skills provide unique information beyond personality traits and that this information matters for predicting outcomes during adolescence. These findings advance our understanding of the nature, correlates, and consequences of SEB skills.
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.
Social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills encompass a wide range of competencies related to how individuals build and maintain relationships, understand and manage emotions, pursue goals, and ...learn from experience. Despite near-consensus on the importance of SEB skills for success in life, there are numerous frameworks that simultaneously converge and diverge in how they define and measure SEB skills. In this article, we discuss our integrative model encompassing five broad skill domains: Self-Management, Innovation, Social Engagement, Cooperation, and Emotional Resilience Skills (Soto et al., 2021a). Our model defines SEB skills as
skills
(i.e., what someone is capable of doing) and not
traits
(i.e., what someone tends to do). Using this definition and model as a foundation, we argue for the importance of investigating SEB skill development during adolescence, a period where SEB skills may be both particularly amenable to change and particularly predictive of life outcomes. In particular, we highlight how SEB skills allow adolescents to take advantage of the new opportunities afforded to them as they make major cognitive and social transitions.
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.
•SEB skills and personality traits both predict academic success in adolescence.•Skills and traits predict most academic outcomes similarly.•Skills add information beyond traits for predicting ...standardized test performance.
The present research examined relations between social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills, personality traits, and academic success in a sample of adolescents (N = 975). Results indicated that both skills and traits robustly predicted school grades, educational aspirations, and performance on a standardized achievement test, even after accounting for demographic characteristics. Moreover, skills and traits were often interchangeable: when assessed using the same cognitive, affective, and behavioral referents, they converged strongly and did not provide incremental validity over each other for predicting most outcomes. However, skills provided some incremental validity beyond traits for predicting standardized test performance. Taken together, these findings highlight the importance of SEB skills and personality traits for predicting and understanding academic success.
Sparfloxacin, a new orally administered fluoroquinolone, was tested against 14,182 clinical strains isolated (generally blood stream and respiratory tract cultures) at nearly 200 hospitals in the ...United States (USA) and Canada. Sparfloxacin activity was compared with 13 other compounds by Etest (AB BIODISK, Solna, Sweden), broth microdilution, or a standardized disk diffusion method. Using the Food and Drug Administration/product package insert MIC breakpoint for sparfloxacin susceptibility (≤0.5 μg/ml), 94% of
Streptococcus pneumoniae (2666 isolates) and 89% of the other streptococci (554 isolates) were susceptible. However, at ≤1 μg/ml (the breakpoint for all nonstreptococcal species) sparfloxacin susceptibility rates increased to 100% and 98%, respectively, for the two groups of streptococci. Only 50% and 65% of pneumococci were susceptible to ciprofloxacin (MIC
90, 3 μg/ml) and penicillin (MIC
90, 1.5 μg/ml), respectively. Although there were significant differences between regions in the USA in the frequency of penicillin-resistant pneumococcal strains, results indicate that the overall sparfloxacin MIC
90 was uniformly at 0.5 μg/ml. Nearly all (≥99%)
Haemophilus species and
Moraxella catarrhalis, including those harboring β-lactamases, were susceptible to sparfloxacin, ciprofloxacin, and amoxicillin/clavulanic acid. Only cefprozil and macrolides demonstrated lower potency and spectrum against these two species. Sparfloxacin was active against oxacillin-susceptible
Staphylococcus aureus (96 to 97%),
Klebsiella spp. (95%), and other tested enteric bacilli (93%). Comparison between broth microdilution MIC and disk diffusion interpretive results for
M. catarrhalis, Staphylococcus aureus, and the Enterobacteriaceae showed an absolute intermethod categorical agreement of >95% using current sparfloxacin breakpoints, in contrast to those of cefpodoxime for
S. aureus where a conspicuous discord (98% versus 59%) between methods was discovered. These results demonstrate that sparfloxacin possesses sufficient in vitro activity and spectrum versus pathogens that cause respiratory tract infections (indications), especially strains resistant to other drug classes such as the earlier fluoroquinolones, oral cephalosporins, macrolides, and amoxicillin/clavulanic acid. The sparfloxacin susceptibility breakpoint for streptococci may require modification (≤1 μg/ml) based on the MIC population analysis presented here. A modal MIC (0.38 to 0.5 μg/ml) was observed at the current breakpoint. Regardless, sparfloxacin inhibited 89% (nonpneumococcal
Streptococcus spp.) to 100% (
Haemophilus spp.,
M. catarrhalis) of the isolates tested with a median activity of 97% against indicated species.
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