When emotional intelligence measures disagree: discordant profiles in allied health students and why classification uncertainty matters

Vollständiger Abstract

Worum geht es in dieser Arbeit?

Introduction Emotional intelligence (EI) is widely studied in health professions education, but two methodological habits limit the field: EI is usually treated as a single continuous predictor, and person-centered studies typically assign students to profiles and then test associations as though those assignments were certain. We addressed both issues, and a third that emerged from our own data: the validity of the profile solution itself. Methods Allied health sciences undergraduates at Kuwait University completed two self-report EI measures: the Schutte Self-Report Emotional Intelligence Test (SSEIT; a self-report measure based on the ability model, indexing self-perceived emotional skill) and the Kuwaiti-Arabic Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire-Short Form (TEIQue-SF; trait model). Of 561 responses, 559 remained after duplicate removal and 489 after excluding 70 invariant (straight-line) responders - a screen motivated by the fact that reverse-scoring maps every constant TEIQue-SF response pattern to a global mean of exactly 4.00, creating duplicate data points that induce degenerate, variance-collapsed solutions in unconstrained mixture models. Latent profile analysis of the two standardized scores was estimated with a variance floor; profile-outcome associations used the bias-adjusted three-step (BCH) approach with bootstrap confidence intervals (1,471 valid resamples of 2,000), compared against naive modal-assignment tests, with Holm and Bonferroni multiplicity control. Results The two measures correlated only modestly (r = 0.35). A four-profile solution was favored on the Bayesian Information Criterion (entropy = 0.65): High EI (28.6%), Average EI (34.2%), Low EI (32.3%), and a Discordant EI profile (4.9%) combining very low self-perceived skill with near-average trait EI. Profile rank-ordering differed across instruments, indicating qualitatively distinct configurations, and the Discordant profile was stable across random starts, outlier removal, and bootstrap resampling. Two associations were robust: students in the Low EI profile attended voluntary EI workshops substantially more often than High and Average profiles, and stress-management confidence was highest in the Discordant profile and lowest in the Average profile. GPA showed no robust association. Discussion Self-report EI measures from different theoretical traditions can disagree enough to define distinct student subgroups, and person-centered EI research must attend to solution validity — careless responding and degenerate likelihood spikes — as well as classification uncertainty.