Evaluating Psychological Distress in adolescence: The Italian Validation of the Social Emotional Distress Scale‑Secondary Level

Social-emotional distress during school years is associated with negative effects on mental health. Schools are an important context for screening social and emotional problems. Therefore, there is a need for a brief, valid and reliable assessment tool that can be used in the school setting to detect social-emotional problems at an early stage. The aim of the present study was to validate the Social Emotional Distress Scale ‑ Secondary Level (SEDS-S) and to examine its psychometric properties and invariance across sex and time in an Italian sample of adolescents. Participants were 1210 (57.7% female) high school students aged 15–18 years (M = 16.40, SD = 1.12) who gave valid responses on the SEDS-S at baseline (T0), 858 of whom completed the questionnaire after an interval of 5 months (T1). The results confirmed the one-factor structure of the SEDS-S, which also showed good reliability and stability over time as well as invariance by sex and across time points. When examining between-sex differences, we found that girls exhibited higher social-emotional distress than boys. A strong correlation with emotional problems provided support for convergent validity, while discriminant validity resulted from the modest and weak correlations with externalising symptoms as well as the negative association with well-being. Overall, the results support the validity of the Italian version of the SEDS-S as a suitable school-based assessment tool for measuring social-emotional problems for screening purposes during school years.