Assessing early childhood social and emotional development: Key conceptual and measurement issues

- Reflects on conceptual and measurement issues for social and emotional development
- Discusses the borders between social and emotional development and other domains
- Discusses the utility of specific social and emotional development measures
- Proposes to map measures onto an agreed upon conceptual framework

This concluding paper takes stock of key issues that have emerged across the papers of this special issue on measuring early childhood social and emotional development, as well as in the broader literature anchoring these papers. While we include separate sections focusing on conceptual and measurement issues, it quickly becomes clear that the two are intertwined. The field lacks conceptual and definitional clarity, thus hindering our understanding of the focus and utility of specific measures. Indeed, our overarching conclusion is that the greatest progress will be made when measures of young children's social and emotional development are clearly mapped onto an agreed upon conceptual framework that both distinguishes social and emotional development from other broad domains (such as cognitive development), and includes carefully delineated and defined subdomains (broad areas within social and emotional development, such as emotional competence), constructs (specific aspects within subdomains, such as emotion knowledge), and corresponding behaviors.