Validation of a Measure to Assess the Social-Emotional Health of Secondary Students

Co-Principal Investigators: Karen Nylund-Gibson, Erin Dowdy

The team also collected longitudinal SEHS-S-2020 responses of 1,372 students attending four California partner high schools. Students had a unique identifier that allowed us to track students' responses over three years for two cohorts: Grades 9–11 and Grades 10–12. Latent transition analysis identified common social emotional assets profiles and their stability across the high school years.

• The SEHS-S-2020 is a psychometric valid instrument for English (Furlong et al., 2021; Wagle et al., 2020) and Spanish language versions (Hinton et al., 2021). Analyses supported structural validity (Furlong et al., 2021), internal consistency (Table 3, Furlong et al., 2021), and measurement invariance for gender (Table 4, Furlong et al., 2021), grade level (Table 5, Furlong et al., 2021), and ethnic identification (Table 7, Furlong et al., 2021).
• The team developed and established the validity of the Social Emotional Distress Scale (SEDS), a brief (10-item) self-report of adolescent distress (Dowdy et al., 2018). The SEDS was co-administered with the SEHS-S-2020 and provided a practical way for schools to meaningfully implement the mental wellness screening Dual-Factor Model, as described in Furlong et al., 2022). Excellent short-term (4 month, Table 9, Furlong et al., 2020) and long-term (one year, Furlong et al., 2021) stability was documented (Furlong et al., 2021.)
• The SEHS-2020 also had wider impact as it was adopted and validated for use in China, Korea, Japan, Mexico, Chile, Spain, Turkey, Iran, Slovakia, Latvia, and the Netherlands. The Scottish government uses SEHS-S items in its TeenCovidLife longitudinal study.
• An unplanned positive grant outcome is that a number of schools in the cross-sectional sample were in unified school districts, which included Grades 7 and 8. As a result the cross-sectional sample included more 30,000 junior high school students. These responses were used to evaluate the SEHS-S-2020 validity and reliability for early adolescents (Furlong, et al., 2021, forthcoming ).

Products

• Comprehensive SEHS-S-2020 Manual: Modification and Standardization of Social Emotional Health Survey-Secondary—2020 Edition
• The SEHS-S-2020 and the SEDS are now included in the CHKS Core Module.
• Development of the Covitality social emotional wellness app for administration, scoring, reporting, and managing school-based screening and monitoring. https://covitality.com/

The research team examined response stability with a longitudinal sample drawn from four collaborating California high schools. As part of the stability investigation, 707 students completed the SEHS-S-2020 in the fall of 2017 and approximately one year later in 2018. See Table 1 (Furlong et al., 2021) for descriptive information.

The team examined short-term stability using a subsample of the September 2018 (T1) longitudinal sample. In January 2019 (T2), a random subsample of students (N = 200) equally divided among Grades 9–12 (n = 50 from each grade level), completed the SEHS-S-2020.

A longitudinal sample was created from students attending four California partner high schools. Students had a unique identifier that allowed us to track students' responses over three years for two cohorts:  Grades 9–11 and Grades 10–12. Latent transition analysis identified common social emotional assets profiles and their stability across the high school years. See p. 13–18 of the grants' final report and forthcoming article Moore, Carter, et al., in preparation.

The SEHS-S-2020 itself has 36 items that assess secondary students' self-reports of social and emotional strengths. The hypothesized latent trait model has three-level, one general factor model with four domains and 12 subscales (three items per subscale) that load onto four domains: belief in self (self-awareness, persistence, self-efficacy), belief in others (school support, family coherence, peer support), emotional competence (empathy, self-control, behavioral self-control), and engaged living (gratitude, zest, and optimism). The four domains loaded onto one general factor called covitality (see Figure 2, Furlong et al., 2020; and Figure 1, Furlong et al., 2021).

• The first domain, belief-in-self, consists of three subscales grounded in constructs from self-determination theory literature: self-efficacy, self-awareness, and persistence.
• The second domain, belief-in-others, comprises three subscales derived from constructs found chiefly in the childhood resilience literature: school support, peer support, and family support.
• The third domain, emotional competence, consists of three subscales based on constructs drawn from the SEL scholarship: emotion regulation, empathy, and behavioral self-control.
• The final domain engaged living, comprises three subscales grounded in constructs derived from the positive youth psychology literature: gratitude, zest, and optimism.

Other essential validation measures were the Social Emotional Distress Scale (SEDS), the Multidimensional Student Life Satisfaction Scale, and the Mental Health Continuum-Short Form. These measures helped assess if SEHS-S-2020 constructs related in excepted ways with other social/emotional factors that support or diminish learning (e.g., personal distress, school satisfaction, school connectedness, student learning strategies, subjective well-being).

Additional online resources and information:

• Monitoring Students' Social-Emotional Wellness (2-hour webinar)
• SHE-S-2020 Covitality Model Overview
• Dual Factor Model Complete Mental Health Screening Overview