Validity evidence for the situational judgment test paradigm in emotional intelligence measurement

Abstract

To date, various measurement approaches have been proposed to assess emotional intelligence (EI). Recently, two new EI tests have been developed based on the situational judgment test (SJT) paradigm: the Situational Test of Emotional Understanding (STEU) and the Situational Test of Emotion Management (STEM). Initial attempts have been made to examine the construct-related validity of these new tests; we extend these findings by placing the tests in a broad nomological network. To this end, 850 undergraduate students completed a personality inventory, a cognitive ability test, a self-report EI test, a performance-based EI measure, the STEU, and the STEM. The SJT-based EI tests were not strongly correlated with personality and fluid cognitive ability. Regarding their relation with existing EI measures, the tests did not capture the same construct as self-report EI measures, but corresponded rather to performance-based EI measures. Overall, these results lend support for the SJT paradigm for measuring EI as an ability.

A closer look at ability emotional intelligence (EI): What are its component parts, and how do they relate to each other?

“…MacCann and Roberts (2008) .13, .17, .17, .18, and .42;Austin, 2010;Ferguson & Austin, 2010;Libbrecht & Lievens, 2012;MacCann et al, 2011;Vonk et al, 2015) and in tone of voice (r = .27; MacCann et al, 2011).…”

“…Possible responses to each scenario were identified from a second sample, and the final responses were scored according to expert judgment as to the effect of the regulation strategy (where later research showed that the experts generally endorsed regulation strategies representing situation modification or cognitive change; Allen, Rahman, Weissman, MacCann, & Roberts, ). Like the STEU, Situational Measure of Emotion Management scores correlate positively with the perception of emotion in both faces ( r = .07, .13, .17, .17, .18, and .42; Austin, ; Ferguson & Austin, ; Libbrecht & Lievens, ; MacCann et al, ; Vonk et al, ) and in tone of voice ( r = .27; MacCann et al, ).…”

“…Meta‐analytic effect size taken from Allen et al (), Austin (), Ferguson and Austin (), Libbrecht and Lievens (), Libbrecht et al (), MacCann et al (), and Vonk et al (), correcting for reliability in both variables ( k = 7, N = 3,001).…”

“…The Situational Test of Emotion Understanding (STEU) correlates with perception of emotion in tone of voice, with estimates of r = .53 and .31 (MacCann, Pearce, & Roberts, ; Thingujam, Laukka, & Elfenbein, ). Correlations of the STEU with perception of emotion in facial expressions are also positive, with estimates of r = .53, .31, .22, .21, .20, and .00 (Austin, ; Ferguson & Austin, 2010; Libbrecht & Lievens, ; Vonk, Zeigler‐Hill, Ewing, Mercer, & Noser, ). Thus, there is potentially a stronger relationship of emotion understanding with vocal measures of emotion perception than with facial expression perception.…”

Differences between multimedia and text-based assessments of emotion management: An exploration with the multimedia emotion management assessment (MEMA)

“…Development of the STEM used critical incidents interviews for the item and response generation and a group of experts for the scoring key development (for a detailed description, see . Available validity evidence for these new SJT-based EI tests is promising (e.g., Burrus et al, 2012;Libbrecht & Lievens, 2012;Libbrecht et al, 2014), though ongoing research continues to be directed at improving the design of these measures and underlying scoring models (see e.g., Allen, Weissman, Hellwig, MacCann, & Roberts, 2014;Allen, Rahman, Weissman, MacCann, & Roberts, 2015).…”