DATASET- Habilidades para la Vida en estudiantes Universitarios de Medellín y Envigado (Colombia)

The aim of the study was to establish the effectiveness of a positive mental health program in social, cognitive, and emotional skills in students of the Universidad Cooperativa de Colombia, Medellín – Envigado campus. For this, a training program based on Habilidades para la Vida (HpV) was provided through the workshop methodology with a group of university students from Medellín and Envigado (Colombia). The strategy incorporates the ten Life Skills proposed by the World Health Organization (WHO), which are classified as cognitive skills (self-knowledge, creative thinking, decision making and critical thinking), emotional (management of emotions and feelings, empathy, management of tension and stress) and social (interpersonal relationships, problem and conflict solving, assertive communication).

The students participated in a cycle of 8 workshops aimed at promoting social, cognitive, and emotional skills, during the first session a pretest was applied aimed at measuring the emotional, cognitive and social skills in the participants of the program. After the development of the workshop cycle and four months later, the performance in HpV of the group of students active in the program was evaluated again.

The instrument applied was the Habilidades para la Vida test (HpV) developed by Díaz-Posada et al. (2013). A test with Likert scale that measures 10 dimensions corresponding to Life skills, 4 indicators for each dimension and 2 items for each indicator, with a total of 80 items.

Among the results, differences between the pre and post measurements of life skills are evident, yielding higher scores in the performance of all the HpV after training, indicating that, after participation in the workshops and activities proposed, the participants strengthened competencies in the management of skills, thus allowing the development of greater interpersonal resources for the development in their daily lives.