The role of special educators’ emotional intelligence in self-efficacy and social inclusion of students with disability

The present study explores the correlation between the special educator’s emotional literacy/ emotional intelligence and their self-efficacy regarding the empowerment and social inclusion of students with disability. The study examines a main sample of 114 special educators working in the Greek education system. The main research hypothesis is centered around the interrelationship between the two key notions while incorporating copious variables such as age, gender, education and teaching experience to thoroughly examine all aspects. The academic tools utilized within this research include the Schutte (1999) Self-Report Emotional Intelligence Test and the Teaching Students with Disabilities Efficacy Scale-TSDES (Dawson and Scott, 2013). The SPSS statistical package has been used to process the data regarding the descriptive and inductive statistical procedures that have been applied. In the end, it appears that emotional intelligence and the sense of self-efficacy of the special education teachers are inextricably linked as the increase in Emotional Intelligence also implies an increase in Self-Efficacy. In addition, with regard to the relations among the variables, it is noted that education is directly related to the level of Emotional Intelligence as PhD holders performed higher than holders of a Master's or Bachelor’s degree. With regard to the participants’ years of Experience, participants with 6-10 years of service had statistically significant superiority over other groups in terms of Emotional Intelligence. Overall, no statistically significant differences between the genders were found with the exception of the Professionalism and Instruction indicators in Self-Efficacy.

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