Assessing Emotional and Social Intelligence in Portuguese Youth: Structural Validity of the EQ-i:YV

The Emotional Quotient Inventory: Youth Version (EQ-i:YV) assesses how young people perceive their emotions, relationships, coping with pressure, adaptability, and general mood. We evaluated whether its five domains provide a coherent yet differentiated representation of emotional-social functioning in 931 Portuguese participants aged 8–16 years. Responses to 54 substantive items were analysed as ordered categories in stratified exploratory and confirmatory subsamples. A restrictive five-factor confirmatory factor analysis did not adequately represent the response pattern, whereas a five-domain Target-ESEM that allowed small associations with related competencies provided a better and internally replicated representation. Domain reliability was adequate to strong (ordinal α = 0.744–0.865; ω = 0.760–0.866). Although the overall composite was reliable, variance attributable to one general factor was only moderate (ωH = 0.592), and the higher-order solution was unstable. The Portuguese EQ-i:YV should therefore be interpreted primarily through its five-domain profile. A global score, when required for descriptive continuity, should be presented only as a secondary multidimensional summary alongside the domain scores.