Emotional skills and competence questionnaire (ESCQ) as a self-report measure of emotional intelligence#

Studies of emotional intelligence (EI) initially appeared in academic journals in the early 1990s. The majority of studies on emotional intelligence have relied on self-ratings. In spite of the critics of self-report scales, there are a large number of self-report measures of EI present in recent literature. The main aim of this paper is to present the constructing procedure, together with the basic psychometric properties of Emotional Skills and Competence Questionnaire (ESCQ) as a self-report measure of EI. Originally, this measure was developed in Croatian settings, using the theoretical framework from the Mayer-Salovey emotional intelligence model. The ESCQ instrument has been translated into several languages. The results have showed that ESCQ has three subscales with decent reliability. They share some amount of common variance with similar well-established constructs such as alexithymia, social skills, and personality traits, but they are not correlated with cognitive abilities. However, due to its sufficient reliability, a great deal of unique variance remains. This unique variance of the ESCQ scales has an incremental contribution in explaining life satisfaction and empathy (as the crucial criteria for EI), and has significant relations with relevant real-life criteria such as quality of leadership, health risk behaviors, and school achievement.