The review, led by Joshua M. Lovett of the University of Illinois Chicago alongside colleagues including Kimberly A. Schonert-Reichl of the University of British Columbia, systematically examined 531 intervention studies published between 2000 and 2025. The team screened more than 12,000 records and distilled them into a comprehensive map of the measures used to assess prosocial behavior across interventions. What emerged was a portrait of remarkable diversity—and remarkable imprecision.

The numbers tell the story. The 531 studies collectively employed 427 distinct measures of prosocial behavior, meaning that on average, each new study introduced a slightly different instrument than the last. Only a small fraction of measures appeared more than once. The most frequently used tool was the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, a brief behavioral screening instrument whose prosocial subscale appeared in 75 studies. Informant reports from teachers and parents dominated the landscape, followed by self-report questionnaires and economic allocation games such as the trust game and dictator game.

This fragmentation is not merely an academic curiosity. When each study uses a different measure, results cannot be meaningfully compared across interventions. Meta-analyses struggle to pool findings. Practitioners cannot determine which programs actually work. And the field’s cumulative knowledge—its ability to build on prior discoveries—is undermined at a fundamental level.

The review also uncovered a deeper conceptual problem: researchers rarely specify what they mean by prosocial behavior. Some studies treat it as a broad disposition, others as a specific act like sharing or helping, and still others as an outcome of empathy or compassion. Without a shared definition, the construct being measured varies from study to study in ways that are often invisible to both researchers and readers.

Psychometric reporting proved equally inconsistent. Among the 427 measures, 30 percent did not report any reliability index, and 79 percent did not report validity evidence. Even when reliability was reported, it was most often internal consistency—Cronbach’s alpha—rather than test-retest stability or inter-rater agreement. This means that many of the instruments at the center of prosocial behavior research have never been rigorously evaluated for the properties that would justify their use.

The consequences ripple outward. In intervention research, unclear constructs and unvalidated measures threaten the internal validity of studies. When researchers cannot demonstrate that their measure actually captures the construct they intend to assess, observed changes in prosocial behavior may reflect measurement artifacts rather than genuine behavioral change. Replication efforts, already strained in psychology, become even more difficult when the original instruments are never fully documented.

The review’s authors argue that the field needs a coordinated effort to establish shared definitions and validated measures. They point to the heterogeneity of the 531 studies—spanning 63 countries, 301 journals, and populations from early childhood through adulthood—as evidence that no single measure can serve all contexts. Instead, they call for researchers to be more precise about the specific facet of prosocial behavior they intend to assess, and to select instruments with documented psychometric properties appropriate for their population and setting.

The timing of this review is significant. Interest in prosocial behavior has surged in recent years, driven partly by research linking it to mental health, well-being, and social cohesion. School-based social and emotional learning programs, mindfulness interventions, and digital prosocial games have all expanded rapidly. As the field grows, the review suggests, so does the risk that its foundational measurement practices will drift further from scientific rigor.

For now, the review offers a sobering baseline. The field’s enthusiasm for cultivating kindness, generosity, and cooperation has outpaced its ability to measure these constructs consistently. Until researchers agree on what prosocial behavior means and how best to assess it, the review concludes, the science of promoting it will remain fragmented—one study, one measure, one definition at a time.

The distinction between the different families of measures identified in the review carries practical weight beyond simple frequency counts. Informant-report measures, which accounted for roughly a quarter of all extracted instruments, typically rely on teachers, parents, or other observers who know the target individual well. Their popularity in intervention research stems largely from convenience: a single adult can rate a child’s behavior across many situations and over extended periods, capturing the kind of naturally occurring helping, sharing, and cooperating that laboratory tasks often miss. Yet informant reports are also vulnerable to halo effects, in which a rater’s general impression of a person colors judgments of specific behaviors, and to reference-group effects, in which ratings depend on the comparison group the rater implicitly uses. Self-report questionnaires, the second most common category, introduce their own complications, since people may overstate their own generosity or interpret questionnaire items in idiosyncratic ways. Economic allocation games, the third major family, offer behavioral observation with real stakes, but a single decision in a one-shot game may not generalize to the sustained, context-dependent prosociality that interventions aim to cultivate.

The prominence of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire in this literature deserves particular scrutiny. Originally developed as a broad behavioral screening tool for emotional and conduct difficulties, its prosocial subscale consists of a small number of items rated by an informant or, in the self-report version, by the respondent. Its ubiquity across the reviewed studies means that a substantial share of the intervention literature rests on a measure that was not designed primarily as a stand-alone index of prosociality. Whether that subscale is sensitive enough to detect change following an intervention—an essential property for outcome measurement, as opposed to screening—remains an open question that the review’s findings on validity reporting do little to resolve.

The review’s window on the field’s growth also situates prosociality research within a broader historical arc. For much of the twentieth century, psychology and education concentrated on deficit reduction: treating aggression, conduct problems, and psychopathology. The rise of positive psychology at the turn of the millennium reframed the agenda toward cultivating strengths, and the fifteen-year publication trend documented in the review tracks that shift. School-based social and emotional learning programs have been a major driver, with meta-analyses of hundreds of such interventions showing gains not only in academic performance but also in observable positive social behavior. This institutional momentum means that measurement decisions made now will shape a large and growing evidence base for years to come.

The conceptual breadth of prosocial behavior itself compounds the measurement challenge. Helping a stranger carry groceries, donating money anonymously, comforting a distressed friend, and cooperating in a workplace team are all prosocial in the ordinary sense, but they differ in motivation, skill, developmental meaning, and situational demand. The construct’s definition deliberately leaves motivation unspecified: a child may share to win approval or out of genuine other-oriented concern, and both count as prosocial behavior. This definitional openness is philosophically defensible but psychometrically costly, because instruments that aggregate across heterogeneous behaviors may dilute the very signal an intervention targets. Decades of research linking prosocial behavior to empathy show that the strength of that association varies depending on which measure of prosociality is used—evidence that different instruments are, in effect, measuring partly different constructs.

The consequences of weak psychometric reporting extend into policy. School districts, public health agencies, and employers increasingly adopt programs whose evaluations rest on the kinds of measures cataloged in this review. When four in five applicable measures lack reported validity evidence, decision-makers cannot easily judge whether an observed improvement reflects genuine behavioral change or an artifact of the instrument. The authors’ call for greater precision in conceptualizing outcomes and for routine reporting of reliability and validity is therefore not a methodological nicety but a precondition for the field’s findings to accumulate into trustworthy guidance for practice.

Subject of Research: Psychology

Article Title: Assessing prosocial behavior in interventions: a scoping review of existing measures and their psychometric properties

Article References: Lovett, J. M., Galloway, C., Bhanushali, P. D., Sarda, S., Bledsoe, A., Thursby Bourke, K., & Schonert-Reichl, K. A. (2026). Assessing prosocial behavior in interventions: a scoping review of existing measures and their psychometric properties. Frontiers in Social Psychology, 4, Article 1804116. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsps.2026.1804116

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frsps.2026.1804116

Keywords: prosocial behavior, psychometrics, measurement, scoping review, intervention research, psychology, Assessing, prosocial, behavior, interventions, scoping, review