Teacher candidates’ emotional intelligence levels and ethical reasoning abilities

Abstract

Problem: The term emotional intelligence attracts the interest of the researchers and practices are from the management filed due to its' contributions to performance, job satisfaction, organizational participation and leadership, increasingly in 21st century. The studies in Turkey mainly focused on the effect of emotional intelligence on work life and performance of the employees (Titrek, 2000). Another issue which also gets attention in management field are the moral values which constitutes an important part of the organizational culture (Çelik, 2000, cited in Kahraman, 2003) and the moral leadership (Bleijerveld, 2001).

When the teacher candidates considered as being a moral leaders as well as instructional leaders, it is important to investigate their emotional intelligence with regard to their ethical reasoning ability. In literature, these two concepts were studied mainly in private organizations. In addition to this, there are very few studies in educational organizations.

Purpose of the Study: Purpose of this study was to investigate the ethical reasoning abilities of the teacher candidates with relation to their genders, ages, departments and the size of the city they have grown by controlling their emotional intelligence.

Method: For data collection, a questionnaire consists of three parts was used. In first part, there were question for gathering information on demographic characteristics of participants. In the second part there was a measure for understanding the emotional intelligence levels of the participants and in the third part there another measure understanding the ethical reasoning abilities of the participants. Questionnaires were administered to the 250 randomly selected teacher candidates, who were continuing to their education in Mehmet Akif Ersoy University, just at the beginning of the spring term in 2006-2007 academic year.  Eight of the questionnaires were removed from the study by researchers since many of the items were not marked or some of items were marked twice. Because of this reason, 242 of the questionnaire were included in data analysis procedure. Frequencies (f), percentages (%), correlations (r) and ANCOVA analyses were conducted by using SPSS 11.5.

Results and Recommendations: Results of this study yielded that there is small relation between emotional intelligence and ethical reasoning abilities of the participants. In addition, gender, age, department and the city size that participants have grown do not have a significant effect on the relationship between ethical reasoning ability and emotional intelligence. 

In this study emotional intelligence was handled as a unique concept, a further research may handle examine sub-dimensions of the emotional intelligence with regard to ethical reasoning ability. At the same time ethical reasoning ability tried to be measured by a Likert type questionnaire in this study, however an open ended measure can be used for measuring this factor with an aim to let the participants express themselves better. For this reason, structured and/or semi structured interviews techniques which can be conducted by an expert interviewer may lead a more reliable results.