Network analysis of social-emotional skills in children and adolescents across ten cities: Evidence from the 2019 OECD Survey on Social and Emotional Skills

Ming Huo and Bo Ning

Social Science & Medicine, 2025, vol. 381, issue C

Abstract: This study analyzes data from the 2019 OECD Survey on Social and Emotional Skills (SSES), assessing social-emotional skills of 10- and 15-year-olds (n=60,985) across ten cities in nine countries: the United States (Houston), Canada (Ottawa), Russia (Moscow), Finland (Helsinki), Portugal (Sintra), Turkey (Istanbul), China (Suzhou), South Korea (Daegu), and Colombia (Bogotá and Manizales). Fifteen skills were examined, including assertiveness, cooperation, creativity, curiosity, emotional control, empathy, energy, optimism, persistence, responsibility, self-control, sociability, stress resistance, tolerance, and trust. Using network analysis, this study identified that cooperation and optimism were consistently among the most central skills, although the degree of their centrality varied across different age groups and cities. In contrast, energy showed weaker connections to other skills among 10-year-olds but stronger connections among 15-year-old in every city. The networks of children and adolescents differed in overall structure and in the global strength of skill interconnections, both in cross-city and most city-specific comparisons. The transition from childhood to adolescence is marked not only by differences in the importance of specific skills, but also by changes in the interactions among them.

Keywords: Network analysis; Social-emotional skills; Cross-city comparison (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2025.118286

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