Design and Validation of an Instrument to Measure Emotional Intelligence in an Ecclesiastical Setting

Understanding emotional intelligence and developing measuring tools to assess its impact on performance have increasingly become the subject of research in several fields. This research aimed to develop, validate, and calculate the reliability of the faith-based emotional intelligence instrument (FBEII), an instrument to measure emotional intelligence in an ecclesiastical setting. The instrument was applied to members of a Christian denomination in the form of two pilots and a third and final application. The first application (n = 362; Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin [KMO] = 0.960) reduced items from thirty-five to twenty-eight. These items did not correlate with the expected five dimensions (self-awareness, self-regulation, selfmotivation, empathy, and social skills). Three items were eliminated in the second application (n = 101; KMO = 0.894), and the remaining items were aligned into two factors, self-management and social management. The final application was to a sample (n = 202; 58% women and 42% men) from various regions of Mexico. An exploratory factorial analysis was performed using the unweighted least squares extraction method with a Promax rotation yielding the following results: KMO = 0.923; Cronbach's alpha = 0.944; McDonald's omega = 0.945; and 45.6 percent of the common variance, explained by the two dimensions of self-management (25.3%) and social management (20.3%). Given these results, FBEII, with its twenty-five items, has the psychometric characteristics necessary to be considered a valid and reliable resource for measuring emotional intelligence in an ecclesiastical setting.