Date of Award

2007

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

College

College of Education and International Services

Program

Higher Education Administration PhD

First Advisor

Hinsdale Bernard

Second Advisor

Erich W. Baumgartner

Third Advisor

Charles H. Tidwell, Jr.

Abstract

Problem

The Orthopaedic Scholar Institute (OSI) Team realized its need for a more objective selection and admission process that, as much as possible, quantified the characteristics desired in OSI students rather than relying solely on referral perception, intuition, and an interview, but it did not have a clear method or approach to do so. Administering standardized inventories that highlighted these desired characteristics and aided in the selection and admission process seemed to be an objective approach to obtain more quantifiable data. The problem for my study was, therefore, whether the Myers- Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) alone could measure a student’s emotional maturity and, subsequently, predict that student’s fit in an orthopaedic setting, or whether another objective measure would be necessary to identify these skills.

Method

This ex-post facto study compared the responses from freshmen in a Midwestern liberal arts college on two standardized instruments (i.e., the MBTI and the Emotional Competence Inventory-University edition [ECI-U]). A one-way ANOVA was performed to determine the relationship between the responses.

Results

The results yielded no relationship between type preference as determined by the MBTI and participants’ level of emotional maturity as measured using the ECI-U. Further, there was no relationship between participants’ level of emotional maturity and gender.

Conclusions

The ECI-U measures emotional maturity in such a way that any MBTI type could be deemed “emotionally mature” as defined in my dissertation. That is, the ECI-U appears to be measuring students’ ability to utilize their opposite MBTI type preferences because of the random distribution of the data. This bodes well for OSI in that the ECI-U may provide an initial indication of emotional maturity for the orthopaedic industry and should be administered to all interested OSI candidates as a tool to better determine emotional maturity.

Subject Area

Universities and colleges--Admission; Myers-Briggs Type Indicator; Emotional intelligence tests

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.32597/dissertations/1567

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