The construct validity of Emotional intelligence (EI) measurement among medical staffs of an emergency room in Taiwan

Emotional intelligence (EI) has its roots in the concept of ‘social intelligence’ and has been an emerging topic for psychological, educational and management in recent years. However, the validity of EI measurement is still imperfectly certified and is awaited for investigation. Medical staffs in emergency room encountered tremendous pressure from handling life-threatening diseases/injuries under a stressful condition. The interaction between an emergency medical staff and patients requires a mature personality for maintaining good quality of care. EI as defined by previous studies is a measurement of parts for such maturity of one’s personality. The main purpose of this study is to offer the measurement of EI among physicians and nurses in a medical center as well as a process of validation on this tool. An EI measurement instrument developed specifically from Chinese populations was adopted for this study. The Mini Marker questionnaire for measuring personality was also used for comparison with EI. The study has collected 181 samples from an emergence room of a medical center in north Taiwan including 77 physicians and 104 nurses. A significant correlation was found between EI and openness to experience among physicians (r=0.24) and nurses (r=0.25). There were consistent findings with previous documents on positive association between EI with emotional stabilities and EI with conscientiousness. Age was significantly associated with EI items in force choice among physicians (r=0.26). The particular EI measurement on this unique population in emergency room is deemed as novel in the field of human resource management. We found some common characteristics and other inconsistent distinctiveness with this high self-autonomic professional staffs as opposed to others. The maturity as surrogated by age was found positively correlated with EI in physicians but not as favorable in nurses. Meanwhile, the openness and emotional stability were allied well with EI score in both physicians and nurses. The study provides grounds for empirical validating of EI in highly professional personnel with which paves the way for extensive applications of this tool in the future. Keyword: Emotional intelligence, EI measurement, medical staffs