Socio-emotional competences in Portuguese youngsters: Developing of assessment tools for parents

Abstract

In the last two decades we have seen the proliferation of assessment tools for socio-emotional competences based on self-report, that only inform us about the beliefs that respondents have about their own competences and not about their real competences. The need to overcome this kind of tools’ limitations, and develop assessment options that foster the ecological validity of collected information, encouraged the development of hetero-evaluation tools based, namely, in the opinions that parents have about their children socio-emotional competences. In this work, with a convenience sample of 715 mothers of both sex youngsters, we present the structural validity’s study of the Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-I; Portuguese version of Bar-On for parents) and the Perceived Social Competence (PSC-Pa: PSC parents’ version). EQ-I is a tool related to beliefs that parents have about their children emotional intelligence, with 38 items (4-point scaled) organized around five factors (Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, Stress Management, Adaptability, and Mood). PSC-Pa is a tool that consists of five subscales related to parent’s perceived social competence of their children in five hypothetical interpersonal situations, with 10 items (3-point scaled) organized around five factors (Intimate Relationship, Leadership, Support and Communication with Peers, and Support and Communication with Adults). Based on exploratory factorial analyses (varimax rotation of factors extracted by principal axis factoring method), and also on the examination of factors’ convergent and discriminant validity and their reliability, we verified that the factorial structure of both tools was jeopardized.