Grounding Professional Coaching Practice with Positive Assessments of Emotional Intelligence

Table 3 SCALE® and ESAP® Cronbach’s alpha Reliability Statistics
	SCALE® (N = 98)			ESAP® (N = 98)			ESAP® (2004, N = 1,389)
	α	No. Items		α	No. Items		α
Self-Esteem	0.70	7		0.83	25		0.81
Assertion	0.75	7		0.82	18		0.60
Comfort	0.73	7		0.61	12		0.74
Empathy	0.85	7		0.90	12		0.79
Drive Strength	0.54	7		0.80	25		0.81
Decision Making	0.75	7		0.80	12		0.76
Time Management	0.86	7		0.91	12		0.82
Influence	0.71	7		0.81	12		0.82
Commitment Ethic	0.52	7		0.66	12		0.76
Stress Management	0.85	7		0.90	25		0.81
Physical Wellness	0.84	7		N/A	N/A		N/A
Aggression*	0.88	7		0.85	18		0.70
Deference*	0.83	7		0.89	18		0.75
Change Orientation*	0.77	7		0.84	12		0.75

 

Overall, the SCALE^® provided strong evidence of internal reliability (Hammett, in press).  The SCALE’s composite measure of Interpersonal skills (combining Assertion, Comfort, & Empathy) was high (α > .80), as were the composite measures of Career and Life Skills (combining Drive Strength, Decision Making, Time Management, Influence, & Commitment Ethic), and Personal Wellness (combining Stress Management & Physical Wellness).  The Problematic Indicator composite (combining Aggression, Deference, & Change Orientation) was also high.  Finally, the overall reliability when combining all items less those making up the Problematic Indicators was very high (α = .94).  Overall based on these reliability statistics, it can be said that the SCALE^® assessment reliably measures the global and composite skills constructs purportedly assessed by the instrument.

Reliability statistics for the ESAP^® are also provided in Table 2.  Including them was necessary because it was the instrument used for the SCALE^® validity comparisons (Hammett, in press).  Its baseline statistics for reliability may also be informative, therefore, as a comparison to SCALE^®. Overall, the ESAP^® yielded very high internal estimates of reliability with all composite scales exceeding α = .92. Finally, combining the ten skills resulted in a total instrument skills reliability of α = .96. One likely reason for the slightly higher composite scale alphas for the ESAP^® compared to SCALE^® is the increased number of items in each scale. Consider, for example, the 25 items that assess Stress Management for ESAP^® compared to only 7 items for the same skill for SCALE^®.  As explained by Kaplan and Saccuzzo (2018),

According to the domain sampling model, each item in a test is an independent sample of the trait or ability being measured. The larger the sample [of items representing the domain], the more likely that the test will represent the true characteristic. In the domain sampling model, the reliability of a test increases as the number of items increases. (p. 124).

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