Examining the structure of emotional intelligence at the item level: new perspectives, new conclusions

Despite twenty years of research, many unknowns remain regarding the Mayer-Salovey (e.g., 1997) model of emotional intelligence (EI) and the validity of tests that have been designed to measure it. Evidence relevant to the internal structure of EI has come mainly from factor-analytic studies of the MSCEIT and the MEIS, utilising parcelled task scores rather than individual test items. This approach has several deficiencies: in addition to the loss of item-level information, it results in an insufficient number of observed variables per factor and an inability to separate structural sources of local item dependence (i.e., method variance) from construct-related variance. The present study (N=707) employed multidimensional item response modelling to investigate the dimensional structure of the MSCEIT, at the item level, for the first time. It is shown that item format and the specific choice of task explain far more of the variance in response patterns than does the hypothesised dimensional structure of EI, to the point that there is no empirical reason to prefer a higher-dimensional model of EI over a unidimensional model. It is argued that the advantage of an item-level perspective can be fundamental, rather than merely incremental.