Social and emotional competencies as predictors of student engagement in youth: a cross-cultural multilevel study

ABSTRACT

Student engagement research in university students has been scarce, despite its major positive role on performance, degree completion and mental health. Social and emotional competencies, which are currently called twenty-first-century skills, exert some impact on student engagement in youth. Since engagement is cultural-sensitive, individual (social and emotional competencies) and cross-cultural (human developmental index and unemployment rate) characteristics were examined in association with student engagement in youth. This study included 2,092 participants from nine countries/regions, aged between 17 and 27 years (M = 21.52, SD = 2.27), mostly cisgender woman (n = 1,035, 68.7%) and undergraduate (n = 1,401, 96.2%). Data were collected using a cross-sectional online survey that included the Student Engagement Scale, the Emotional Skills and Competence Questionnaire, and the prosocial behaviour/resources subscale of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. Multilevel-models showed that social and emotional competencies were relevant predictors of student engagement independently of the country-level variables. Moreover, student engagement varied with country/region human development and unemployment rate, with students from higher developed countries/regions and lowered unemployment reporting lower engagement. This study reinforces the need to implement evidence-based social and emotional learning programmes in universities worldwide, as well as public policies that can influence engagement and protect youth.

KEYWORDS:

• Cross-cultural
• emotional competence
• social skills
• student engagement
• youth

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Portuguese National Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT - MCTES) [grants numbers SFRH/BD/126304/2016 and COVID/BD/151772/2021 attributed to the first author]. The authors would like to acknowledge Emanuel Frazão for his great support in the study registration stage; Natalie Galea, who supported data collection at the University of Malta; and Fernanda Queiroz, Maria Estela Martins Silva and Luan Fernandes, who supported data collection at the University of São Paulo. Also, we would like to thank the reviewers for taking the time and effort necessary to review the manuscript. We sincerely appreciate their valuable comments and suggestions, which helped us to improve the quality of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

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

Conflict of interest statement

No conflict of interest was declared

Notes

1 In the study registration (https://osf.io/q5nb2) we initially included the employment rate as a country variable. However, because this value was absent for two countries (Mozambique and Taiwan) we used the unemployment rate instead.

2 First-generation students are defined as individuals who are part of the first generation in their family to attend college (Gibson & Slate, 2010).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia: [Grant Number COVID/BD/151772/2021,SFRH/BD/126304/2016].