Design and Validation of Children's Emotional Intelligence Assessment Questionnaire (Parent Form)

Since assessing emotional intelligence from childhood is important, this study aimed to develop and validate an emotional intelligence questionnaire for Iranian culture.

 This is a descriptive and developmental study in which the questionnaire was designed with 68 items. The study population consisted of 618 mothers of children 6 to 9 years old in Tehran in the academic year 1400, that were selected from schools by means of accessible way. The content validity was determined by 10 college professors who were chosen in an accessible way. For construct validity, exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis were performed, and the internal consistency of the questionnaire was determined by calculating Cronbach's alpha coefficient.

 Based on the analysis of the questionnaire, 9 items were omitted because their content validity ratio was less than 0.62 and content validity index was less than 0.79, final analysis was performed with 59 items. Based on the exploratory factor analysis, 7 factors were able to explain the variances, and after rotation with the varimax method, the total factors explained 62.516% of the variance. In the confirmatory factor analysis, the goodness-of-fit index reached 0.943, which was acceptable. The internal consistency of the questions was also 0.95.

 Based on the results of this study, it can be concluded that the present questionnaire is a valid instrument for assessing children from 6 to 9 years old.