The objective of this research is to study the effects of children's ego-resilience and emotional intelligence, as perceived by their parents, on school adjustment in order to bring to light the importance of children's ego-resilience and emotional in...
The objective of this research is to study the effects of children's ego-resilience and emotional intelligence, as perceived by their parents, on school adjustment in order to bring to light the importance of children's ego-resilience and emotional intelligence.
Research targets were fifth and sixth graders attending elementary schools in the Seoul metropolitan area and the Kyung-gi province and their parents, comprising a total pool of 379 subjects. The measurement tools utilized for this research were 1) the Ego-Resilience Scale (ERS) of KPI-C, a standard analysis tool the validity for which was verified by Ji-Yeon Lee, Soon Taek Hwang, and Soo Kyung Lee (2001) created to be analyzed by the a child's guardian (the mother) in order to measure a child's ego-resilience and 2) the emotional intelligence analysis created by Yong Lin Moon (1996) based on the emotional intelligence model developed by Salovey and Mayer (1990) was utilized as a self reporting type measurement tool to understand how a child perceives his or her own emotional intelligence for emotional intelligence analysis. Moreover, in order to measure the children's overall school adjustment, the school adjustment scale revised and supplemented by Sang Mi Choi (2003) from those originally created by Dong Hoon Ryu (1999).
The information collected during this research was analyzed using the SAS statistics program. Frequencies and percentiles were calculated in order to study the research subjects' general characteristics. Moreover, simple regression analysis, multiple regression analysis, and mediation effect verification were utilized for information analysis.
The summary of the results of this study is as follows.
First, the children's self resilience as reported by the mothers did have an effect on the children's school adjustment. Namely, in the cases where the mothers perceived their children to always be active and confident, the children showed very good school adjustment and pro-social interaction with their teachers and their school peers while actively participating in class and other school events and activities. Also, among the children reported by their mothers as being ego resilient, research showed that the more these children were easily able to acknowledge their mistakes and were generally optimistic, the better their relations were with their teacher and other school peers, and better they were at learning activities, following the rules and adjustment to various school activities.
Second, children's emotional intelligence did have an effect on school adjustment. It was found that a child's ability to exercise control over his or her emotions according to different situations and being sensitively aware of the emotions of others played an important role in his or her school adjustment. Hence, the better the children were able to appropriately control their emotions with an understanding of the thread of connection between his or her emotions with the other person, the higher their school adjustment scale forming closer relationships with their teachers, intermingling well with school peers and abiding by the rules.
Third, upon examination of the mediation effect between a mother's perception of their child's ego-resilience, the child's emotional intelligence, and the child's school adjustment, school adjustment was not only influenced by the direct effect of the ego-resilience as reported by the mother, but also mediated with the child's emotional intelligence and effected adjusting to peer and teacher relations, learning activities, following the rules, and school activities and showed that the child's emotional intelligence effect plays a key role. That is to say, it can be derived that the ego-resilience of a child as reported by his or her mother with the child's emotional intelligence as a medium does indeed have an effect on the child's school adjustment.