Inteligencia emocional: Desarrollo y validación de un instrumento de medida

The paper aims to show how an instrument for measuring Emotional Intelligence was built, developed and validated. Four steps were done: 1) 96 items were written from the literature and the own work of the authors; 2) a questionnaire was built and applied to a sample comprising 339 individuals; 3) a principal component analysis was performed; 4) the six emergent dimensions were related to a measure of life satisfaction. The findings suggest a six-factor solution. The internal consistencies are always higher than 0.70. The seven dimensions explain 29% of the variance of life satisfaction.