The Italian Behavioral, Emotional, and Social Skills Inventory (BESSI-I)

Abstract

The importance of social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills is recognized worldwide, but their measurement has always been a challenge. The BESSI measures 32 SEB skills, divided into five domains (social engagement, cooperation, self-management, emotional resilience, and innovation), but its validity must be expanded to new languages and contexts. Across two studies (N₁ = 990, N₂= 824) we developed the Italian version of the BESSI, provided further support for its convergent and discriminant validity with the Big Five, and expanded its nomological network to procrastination, self-efficacy, and emotion regulation. The BESSI-I showed excellent internal reliability and satisfactory fit indices at the facet, domain, and overarching framework level. We also confirmed the correlations between the SEB skills and the Big Five personality traits and found meaningful correlations with the selected external outcomes. Overall, we confirm that the BESSI-I is a valid and useful instrument to assess SEB skills for research and clinical purposes.

Acknowledgments

We thank Giulia Cramarossa, Ludovica Faverin, Thomas Pinaffo, Cornelia Sarpe, Federica Scapin, and Chiara Tomasella for helping with data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data, Open Materials and Preregistered through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/VYZPN and https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/ZXBD3. To obtain the author’s disclosure form, please contact the Editor.

Data availability statement

Data, code, and materials are available on OSF at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/VYZPN