Reporting-source differences in associations between student-perceived relationships with teachers and social-emotional skills: evidence from the Suzhou SSES 2019 sample

Students' perceptions of their relationships with teachers may be associated with social-emotional functioning, but the magnitude of this association may depend on who reports the outcomes. This study examined whether student-perceived relationships with teachers were associated with five domains of social-emotional skills reported by students, parents, and teachers, and whether association magnitudes differed across reporting sources.

Data were drawn from 7,246 students in 151 school-by-cohort units in the Suzhou sample of the 2019 OECD Survey on Social and Emotional Skills. Survey-weighted fixed-effects models estimated within-unit associations, matched stacked models compared slopes across informants, and school-by-cohort-grouped cross-validation assessed incremental prediction.

All 15 informant-by-domain associations were positive and remained significant after false-discovery-rate correction. In matched samples, student-report slopes ranged from 0.234 to 0.256, compared with 0.083 to 0.109 for parent reports and 0.080 to 0.106 for teacher reports. All student-versus-adult contrasts remained significant after correction, whereas none of the parent-versus-teacher contrasts did. The same pattern was observed in 44 of 45 skill-level tests. Adding the relationship index improved out-of-fold weighted R² in all 30 prediction comparisons, although absolute predictive performance was weak, particularly for adult-reported outcomes.

Student-perceived relationships with teachers showed cross-informant relevance, while the strongest observed associations occurred when both the relationship measure and the social-emotional outcome shared the student reporter. These findings suggest that reporting source should be treated as substantive information in educational assessment and that relationship ratings should be used to contextualize, rather than replace, multi-informant evidence.