Part V: creating the EQ-i 2.0 and EQ 360 2.0

South African Norms

Overview

The release of the South African EQ-i 2.0 Professional Norms and the South African EQ 360 2.0 Norms provides users with the ability to score their clients against data collected from South Africa. This chapter is designed to provide normative and psychometric information particular to populations in South Africa. The EQ-i 2.0 and EQ 360 2.0 assessments remain unchanged, but additional normative samples are now available (the original North American normative samples are described in detail in Standardization, Reliability, and Validity; information about normative data from other countries is available in Additional Norms).

This chapter describes the development of the EQ-i 2.0 South African normative sample. For information on the EQ-i 2.0, including administration, interpretation, and development of the North American Norms, please refer to Parts I–V of the EQ-i 2.0 User’s Handbook.

The first section of this chapter is devoted to the development, standardization, reliability, and validity of the South African EQ-i 2.0 Norms, and the second section describes the same properties for the South African EQ 360 2.0 Norms.

The EQ-i 2.0 data were collected from 1,200 South Africans, evenly proportioned by gender within four age intervals from across the country. Several small effects were found for gender. Women scored higher than men on Emotional Self-Awareness, Emotional Expression, and Empathy; men scored higher than women on the Self-Regard, Problem Solving, Stress Tolerance, and Optimism subscales, as well as the Decision Making and Stress Management composite scales. Small effects were also seen across age groups for the Total EI score and several other scales, leading to the creation of both overall norms, as well as age and gender specific norms. Examination of ethnicity effects showed that for the majority of the scales, the Asian/Indian group scored the highest, followed by the Black group. The White and Coloured groups scored similarly to each other, but both groups tended to score lower than the Black and Asian/Indian groups. South Africans tended to score higher than North Americans on the EQ-i 2.0 scales, however few meaningful differences were observed. Finally, EQ-i 2.0 scores were found to be highly reliable in the South African sample, and the factor structure that was developed in North America was replicated with the South African EQ-i 2.0 normative data.

The EQ 360 2.0 data were collected from 1,000 South African raters. Similar to results from other countries (i.e., Canada, United States, Australia, United Kingdom, and Ireland), negligible effects were found for ratee gender, age, and rater type (i.e., manager, direct report, work peer, and friend/family member). As a result, one overall norm group was created that collapses across all of these variables. Upon examination of ethnicity effects for the EQ 360 2.0, there were no strong differences across ethnic groups in the South African normative sample. South Africans tended to be rated more highly than North Americans across most of the EQ 360 2.0 scales. Finally, EQ 360 2.0 scores were found to be highly reliable in the South African sample, and the factor structure that was developed in North America was replicated with the South African EQ 360 2.0 normative data.