Predicting adolescents social skills based on their parents emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence and social skills are two intertwined concepts as each person's level of social skills requires emotional intelligence and emotional intelligence also emerges through social skills.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between adolescents' social skills and their parents' emotional intelligence and to predict the social skills of these adolescents based on their parents' emotional intelligence among adolescents in Tehran.

The method of this study was descriptive- correlational. The study population consisted of all Tehranian adolescents )13 - 17) whose parents were alive. The sample of this study included 150 adolescents (with their parents) in Tehran who were selected through random cluster sampling. In addition to demographic questionnaire, Inderbitzen and Foster's (1992) adolescents' social skills questionnaire and Goleman's (2001) emotional intelligence questionnaire were used. Descriptive statistics indices (mean and standard deviation) and multivariate regression analysis were used for data analysis by SPSS-22 software.

The results showed that there is a significant relationship between adolescent's social skills and their parents' emotional intelligence (Sig=0.05). Moreover, 14.4% of the variance in adolescent social skills was explained by parents' emotional intelligence. More precisely, according to data regression analysis, 3.9% of variance in adolescent social skills was estimated by maternal emotional intelligence and 0.5% of variance by father emotional intelligence.

To conclude, it seems that high parental emotional intelligence has a positive and significant relationship with increasing adolescent social skills.