Exploratory Graph Analysis Failed to Reproduce the Hypothesized Functional Zoning Framework in the OECD Survey on Social and Emotional Skills.

Abstract

The OECD's first Survey on Social and Emotional Skills (SSES) in 2019 assessed 10- and 15-year-olds across ten cities, employing a framework of 15 skills organized into five dimensions aligned with the Big Five personality traits. While this adult-derived model offers a parsimonious structure for measuring social-emotional skills, its applicability to children and early adolescents across diverse cultural contexts remains largely untested. This study examined the structural validity of the SSES framework employing exploratory graph analysis (EGA)-a network psychometrics technique using skill facets as nodes, regularized partial correlations as edge weights, and the walktrap algorithm for community detection. Drawing on self-report data from 60,440 participants aged 10 and 15 across ten international cities, our analysis revealed that contrary to expectation, the hypothesized five-factor structure did not emerge in any age group or city. Among 10-year-olds, skills remained largely undifferentiated or showed only preliminary clustering in most cities, suggesting developmental immaturity in functional organization. Among 15-year-olds, three to four distinct dimensions emerged, with significant cross-city variation in composition. Developmental trajectories also differed culturally: Houston, Sintra, and Istanbul exhibited early-but-stagnant differentiation, while Suzhou showed rapid progression from undifferentiated to four-dimensional structure. These findings identify key limitations in applying the SSES framework: (1) the pattern of conditional dependencies among skill facets violates the local independence assumption underlying the five-factor model; (2) the organization of skills is not equivalent across ages: 10-year-olds show largely undifferentiated structures while 15-year-olds exhibit clearer differentiation; and (3) dimensional configurations vary substantially across cities, challenging assumptions of cross-cultural universality. The results inform researchers and policymakers about the framework's limitations and highlight the need for age- and culture-sensitive approaches to social-emotional skills assessment.