Cross-cultural comparison of trait emotional intelligence: A study of Kazakh and Canadian children

The concept of Trait emotional intelligence (TEI) continues to attract interest from researchers across various fields. While the literature emphasizes the importance of TEI throughout the lifespan, the question of whether the TEI construct generalizes across diverse cultural groups remains largely unaddressed in children. The present study examined the generalizability of the youth version of a widely used self-report measure of TEI (EQi:YV-Short) in Canadian and Kazakh children. Families in Kazakhstan offer a useful comparison to those in Canada, as this Asian culture traditionally emphasizes social interdependence- a very different emotion socialization context from the emphasis on independence in Canadian families. A sample of 200 children (92 boys and 108 girls) between the ages of 9 and 11 from Kazakhstan were compared to a sample of Canadian children ( n = 200). The mean age of the boys in both samples was 9.45 years (SD = 0.52) and for girls was 9.41 years (SD = 0.55). The Canadian sample was collected from children in central and eastern Ontario who identified themselves as “white/Caucasian” and were randomly matched with the Kazakh sample based on age and gender. The results show that Kazakh children scored higher on the intrapersonal dimension, while Canadian children scored higher on the interpersonal, stress management and total TEI dimensions. Findings are discussed with reference to cross-cultural generalizability and applications of TEI theory.