Growing interest in understanding the role of students' social-emotional competence for school success necessitates valid measures for large-scale use. We provide validity evidence for the 40-item Washoe County School District Social-Emotional Competency Assessment (WCSD-SECA), a student self-report measure that came from a researcher-practitioner partnership. The WCSD's social and emotional learning standards, which detail when and at what grade students are expected to express different competencies, contributed to hypotheses about the social-emotional competency levels targeted by the WCSD-SECA items. Across two survey years, Rasch analyses showed that the empirical item ordering aligned with the expected ordering to varying degrees, that items better targeted students at low to middle competency levels, and that some items showed differential item functioning across grades and gender/ race-ethnicity. Future research can use similar methods to theorize and test how items array along latent competency dimensions in general and for particular subgroups. Especially when accomplished within a researcher-practitioner partnership, such efforts can mutually inform district social and emotional learning standards, helping document student progress in a locally and practically relevant way. By making the WCSD-SECA items freely available, we make it easy for researchers and practitioners to complete future refinements and adaptations.
Impact and ImplicationsWe provide three types of validity evidence for the 40-item Social-Emotional Competency Assessment (SECA), a measure developed through a researcher-practitioner partnership with a large Western school district. The items better targeted students at low to middle competency levels, often (not always) were consistent with district standards, and sometimes functioned differently by students' grade levels and gender/race-ethnicity.
Guided by stress process perspectives, this study conceptualizes marital conflict as a multidimensional stressor to assess how three aspects of conflict—frequency of disagreements, breadth of disagreements, and cumulative disagreements—impact subjective health. Longitudinal data of married couples spanning 16 years (n = 373 couples) were analyzed using multilevel modeling. For husbands, more frequent disagreements than usual within a given year were associated with poorer subjective health. For wives, the greater cumulative effects of disagreements over 16 years were harmful for subjective health. We discuss how gendered self‐representations and relationship power issues help explain the findings. This research demonstrated the importance of examining multiple aspects of marital conflict to reveal that their subjective health consequences function differently for wives and husbands.
Sexual self-disclosure is a critical component of relationship and sexual satisfaction, yet little is known about the mechanisms that facilitate a person's engagement in sexual self-disclosure. Individuals (N = 265) involved in romantic relationships participated in an online study testing a contextual model of sexual self-disclosure across three contexts: relationship context, sexual self-disclosure context, and outcome of sexual self-disclosure. Results suggest that sexual satisfaction was predicted by a positive relationship context and a positive sexual self-disclosure context. In addition, the sexual self-disclosure context was predicted by the relationship context. These findings emphasize the importance of examining contextual influences that determine whether an individual will engage in or avoid sexual self-disclosure and the consequences of this engagement or avoidance on sexual satisfaction.
Objective: Drawing on a feminist framework and social cognitive theory, we examine parental communications about sexual and relationship violence and gendered patterns of communication.
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