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Changes in social, emotional, and behavioral skills are associated with changes in secondary school students’ important outcomes

Christopher M. Napolitano et al.

European Journal of Personality2025https://doi.org/10.1177/08902070251328046article
ABDC A
Weight
0.44

Abstract

Evidence across the social sciences suggests the importance of social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills for a wide variety of youth outcomes. However, most of this work is cross-sectional. We know little about how patterns of change in adolescents’ SEB skills may be related to commensurate patterns of change in important outcomes across an academic year. Drawing from a sample of American secondary school students ( N = 942), this longitudinal study employs latent change score models to fill that gap. We report four key findings. We find that (1) a short version of the Behavioral, Emotional, and Social Skills Inventory (BESSI) is psychometrically suitable for longitudinal analyses. We further find that (2) SEB skills are highly stable, on average, but also (3) characterized by significant between-person variation in change. Centrally, we find that (4) positive changes in SEB skills are related to changes in academic engagement, friendship quality, anxiety, depression, life satisfaction, as well as other measures of social and emotional competencies. Taken together, the results suggest that SEB skills are malleable, but future work is needed to identify patterns of change and develop and test targeted interventions.

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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/08902070251328046

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@article{christopher2025,
  title        = {{Changes in social, emotional, and behavioral skills are associated with changes in secondary school students’ important outcomes}},
  author       = {Christopher M. Napolitano et al.},
  journal      = {European Journal of Personality},
  year         = {2025},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/08902070251328046},
}

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Evidence weight

0.44

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.32 × 0.4 = 0.13
M · momentum0.57 × 0.15 = 0.09
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.