A bifactor model of the Wong and Law Emotional Intelligence Scale and its association with subjective well-being

ABSTRACT

Although the Wong and Law Emotional Intelligence Scale (WLEIS) has been validated in many studies, it has not been validated with bifactor model. Study 1 conducted a confirmatory factor analysis with a sample of 525 Chinese university students aged 18–30 years old, and found that the bifactor model with a general factor and four specific factors showed the best fit to the data. Study 2 cross-validated these findings in another 724 adult sample aged 17–56 years old, and the measurement invariance between students and employees was obtained. Besides, the results of Structural Equation Modeling demonstrated that the general factor could predict the three components of subjective well-being (i.e., life satisfaction, positive affect, and negative affect), but only the specific factor of Use of Emotion could predict positive affect. Moreover, there were no differences in these relations between students and employees. Implications and future directions of the findings were discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotional intelligence
• subjective well-being
• bifactor model
• measurement invariance

Acknowledgments

We thank all the participants in this study.

Ethnic statement

The study was conducted according to the Declaration of Helsinki. We report how we determined our sample size, all data exclusions, all manipulations, and all measures in the study.

Disclosure statement

All authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [31700945,31800942]; Young Talent fund of University Association for Science and Technology in Shaanxi, China [20180206]; Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [GK201903106].