Investigation of the Emotional Intelligence Levels of University Students Working Voluntarily in Special Olympics

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate of the emotional intelligence levels of university students working voluntarily in Special Olympics. The research was designed with a descriptive survey model, one of the quantitative research methods. A total of 256 university students participated in the study. 135 students voluntarily worked in Special Olympic. 121 students didn’t serve in Special Olympic. The emotional Intelligence Scale developed by Chan (2004) and used as Turkish by Aslan and Özata (2008) was employed as a data collection tool in the study. It was determined that the research data showed normal distribution. Then, it was decided that the parametric test was used. Independent samples T-test was preferred to compare the emotional intelligence levels of working voluntarily and non-working students in Special Olympics. Likewise, a t-test was used to investigate the emotional intelligence of volunteers according to gender. As a result of the analysis, it was determined that the scores of working voluntarily students were statistically higher in the emotional appraisal, positive regulation, empathic sensitivity, positive utilization sub-dimensions and general emotional intelligence scores than the non-working students in the organization. But, according to the gender variable, there was no statistically significant difference between the participants in both sub-dimensions and the whole scale. According to these results, it can be said that emotional intelligence levels of individuals who serve voluntarily in organizations for disabled people, like Special Olympics, were higher. Moreover, it can be deduced that there is no difference according to gender in the emotional intelligence levels of the participants working voluntarily in Special Olympics.