Evidence of Content Validity of a Measure of Socio-emotional Competencies for Children and Adolescents

Abstract

The development of the socio-emotional skills of children and adolescents has been the focus of intense research around the world in recent decades. In Brazil, this topic has become increasingly relevant, although there is a shortage of instruments with psychometric evidence to evaluate the course of development of these skills. Therefore, the goal of this study is to present evidence on the construction of a tool that measures the development of socio-emotional skills for children and adolescents. To achieve this goal, five English-language instruments were selected from the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning website and new items were created. A process of translation and back-translation was carried out. At the end of this process, an analysis of the items was requested by three experts, considering the clarity, relevance, and theoretical consistency of the items. Overall, the items demonstrated adequate levels of clarity, relevance and theoretical consistency. These results indicate that the final set of items presented evidence of content validity and demonstrated being consistent and relevant for further investigation in new studies.