The Relationship Between Emotional Intelligence and Professional Self-Efficacy in Early Childhood Education: A Comparative Analysis of Pre-Service and In-Service Preschool Teachers

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Teachers’ professional self-efficacy is one of the key determinants of the quality of early childhood education; however, there is little empirical evidence available on the personal psychological resources underlying its development within the Hungarian preschool education context. The aim of this cross-sectional study was to explore the relationship between emotional intelligence and professional self-efficacy, and to examine whether this relationship differs between groups representing two stages of professional socialisation. The sample comprised 234 pre-service preschool teachers and 177 in-service preschool teachers (N = 411), who completed the Hungarian version of the Wong and Law Emotional Intelligence Scale (WLEIS-HU) and the self-efficacy scale of the ORA questionnaire. The analysis was based on a measurement invariance test, hierarchical regressions estimated using HC3 robust errors, relative weight analysis, an equivalence test (TOST) and multi-group latent structural models. Emotional intelligence showed a strong, stable positive association with professional self-efficacy across all model variants (β = 0.594; around 0.70 at the latent level), and no evidence was found that its strength differed between the two groups, although the confidence intervals do not exclude small-to-moderate differences. Of the dimensions, the assessment of others’ emotions showed the largest relative weight, although only its contrast with the assessment of one’s own emotions was statistically distinguishable. The level of professional self-efficacy did not differ between the two groups: the difference was reliably smaller than a small-to-medium effect size. The comparable association in the pre-service group is compatible with the possibility that the link between emotional resources and beliefs about competence is already present during initial training—an interpretation that requires longitudinal confirmation—and supports integrating the development of emotional competences into initial teacher education.