1. The relationship between Emotional Intelligence and university integration among the students of Faculty of education- Taiz University

Abstract

This study has three main objectives in mind: (1) to investigate the level of emotional intelligence and university integration among Yemeni learners (first year) at the Faculty of Education; (2) to identify the relationship between the emotional intelligence and university integration; and (3) to find out the differences in the emotional intelligence among the learners based on the variables of gender (malefemale) and specialization (science-humanity) during the academic year 2010-2011. The present study used a survey research design. The sample of the study was composed of (340) students from different majors at the Faculty of Education at Taiz University.

Different instruments were used in this study:

1) The criterion of (Bar-On, 1997) of emotional intelligence with its five dimensions (personal, intrapersonal, adaptation, stress management, and the general mood)

2) The criterion of university integration (prepared by the researcher) was also used with its different fields (classmates, university courses, the programs and systems of the faculty, teachers, emotional area, and the majoring).

After analyzing the results using the suitable statistical procedures (Independent-samples t-test, Paired-samples t-test, and Pearson correlation), four findings were reached:

1) The university students (first-year level) had low levels of university integration and emotional intelligence;

2) There was a strong, positive correlation between emotional intelligence and university integration (r = 0.85), which means that the less the individual had skills of emotional intelligence, the less the ability he/she had to integrate into the university environment and vice versa;

3) There were differences in some of the constructs of emotional intelligence between males and females based on the gender variable (p = 0.05), in which females performed well, when comparing with males, with regard to the intrapersonal skills which include the emotional and social skills, whereas, male students performed well when taking into account the dimensions of stress management and the general mood; and

4) There were no differences in the mean scores of the main constructs of emotional intelligence at the level of (0.05), based on the specialization variable (science-humanity).