Differences by culture in an initial validation of an instrument in construction to evaluate emotional intelligence in a sample of primary students

Abstract

Culture differences over initial a validation of a test under construction to asses Emotional Intelligence in Primary degree students. The objective of this paper is to develop a questionnaire to assess Emotional Intelligence (EI), following the model which sees it as a set of skills, using as reference the MSCEIT (Mayer et al., 2009) aimed at a sample of students from Primary Education. To prevent the validity be adversely affected, we applied analysis to both customs/religion separately. We focused on 404 participants from 6 to 12 years old, from 4 different schools; 42.2% are boys and 57.8% girls; 58.9% are Muslims and 41.1% Christians. The techniques used in this survey are a test developed to assess EI in teenagers and a similar adaptation of EHS (Gismero, 2000). The results show high levels of reliability for both customs/religion groups. The dimensions are different (4 Christians and 5 Muslims) for both groups. There are positive correlations between totals and the dimensions that make them. We found no significant correlations between the two scales. Therefore this questionnaire is an appropriate tool to evaluate these capabilities after making some modifications in future works. It is more appropriate to apply the analysis separately.