Gender influence on Emotional Intelligence of adults

Abstract

The present research is an empirical effort made to explore the relationship between gender and Emotional Intelligence in Indian context. The sample-size of this study is 500. The respondents are teachers (200), Nurses (150) and the Information Technology (IT) professionals (150). The stratified random sampling method is adopted. The age of the respondents ranges from 22 to 56 (M= 31.89). The research is executed with non-clinical samples. The statistical tools adopted are: Emotional Intelligence scale (Hyde, A., Pethe, S., &Dhar, U. (2002), and Personal Information Schedule designed by the research investigator. The participants are contacted individually by the researcher and data is obtained with the help of the selected tools. The descriptive statistics and correlations are used for the statistical analyses. Results indicated that12.2% of adults have scored low on the emotional intelligence which indicates that these adults experience interpersonal difficulties at the work place. And 32.9% of adults have scored high on the dimensions of the emotional intelligence. This implies that these adults have better interpersonal relationship at work place. Gender is positively as well as negatively correlated with the dimensions of emotional intelligence. Further gender is statistically significant at the 0.01 level of significance as well as at the 0.05 level of significance with the dimensions of emotional intelligence. This finding supports the understanding of emotional intelligence and the development of effective strategies in counselling and psychotherapy.