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

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.