| Emotional intelligence (EI) has been studied extensively in the past 10 years. However, to date most of the studies have concentrated on the North American and European cultural context. In this study I intended to address this shortfall by assessing the measurement equivalence of two EI measures [Le. Wong & Law Emotional Intelligence Scale (WLEIS) developed in Hong Kong, and College Achievement Inventory (CAI) developed in Canada], and examining the original factor structure of both relative to the factor structure obtained in the present study. Two studies were conducted - one in Beijing (N=680), which included participants from Beijing Normal University and other Beijing universities, and the other in Calgary, which included Chinese students who were administered the instruments in either Chinese or English. Results indicated the WLEIS has satisfactory reliability across all four groups, the four-factor structure was replicated, and configural and metric invariance were supported across four groups. In contrast, results from the CAI analysis indicated the internal consistency reliability for the four subscales of the CAI were not acceptable, and the original four-factor structure was not replicated in any of the four groups. These findings suggest that EI measures are not transportable across cultural contexts, probably due to cultural differences, and that further research should be cautious of the cultural bias in an EI measure, and measurement equivalence should be investigated in EI cross-cultural studies. |
