Socio-emotional competence of older adolescents: a comparison of self-report and external assessment

Effective assessment of the social and emotional competence of children and adolescents is important for studying individual and age differences, as well as for preventing behavioral and emotional difficulties and developing assistance measures. Different types of assessment (self-report and external assessment by teachers, parents, peers) provide important information about social and emotional development, but they do not always show concordance since each informant has his own experience of observing certain characteristics of children. In this study, we examine the socio-emotional competence of older adolescents through emotional intelligence, measured by the self-report method, and external assessment of various forms of social behavior by school teachers. Particular attention is given to the question of corre-spondence between the assessments of students and teachers. The study involved 42 teenagers aged 14-16 and their class teachers. The adolescents filled out the EmIn questionnaire aimed at assessing the respondents’ perceptions of their emotional intelligence. The teachers filled out a questionnaire that included an assessment of five different aspects of social and emotional development: understanding of emotions and the ability to predict behavior based on that, understanding of social situations, empathy, prosocial behavior, communication skills, etc. The analysis of the data showed low concordance between the assessments given by adolescents and teachers. Correlation was found only in the assessment of the aspect of understanding emotions. At the same time, the analysis of assessments given in two different classes (and, accordingly, by different teachers) revealed significant differences. This highlights the importance of quality of external evaluation and selection of experts to conduct research. The results raise new research questions and indicate the need for further search for external criteria of socio-emotional competence in adolescence and for selection of adequate assessment methods.