Emotional Intelligent Scale for International Students in Higher Education: Validity and Reliability Study

This study, which adopts an eclectic and holistic viewpoint, attempts to develop and test an instrument to measure the emotional intelligence of international students. Purposive sampling techniques of greatest variation were used to collect data from a sample of international undergraduate students (n=1560) enrolled in five Turkish state universities. Two distinct groups of international students participated in the analyses, which were carried out in two successive phases. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was used to find factor structure after a thorough data clean-up and preliminary assessments for the assumptions of normality and reliability. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used in the second step to validate the scale structure that EFA had shown. The Emotional Intelligence Scale for International Students' construct validity, model fit, and factor reliability are all confirmed by the outcomes of a thorough and iterative scale development procedure. As a multi-dimensional tool, the scale has 25 items on a five-point Likert scale, with three factors labelled as understanding and regulation of emotion, utilization of emotion and social awareness. The study includes the scale's final form with psychometric properties, along with implications and constraints for further research.