The investigation of relationship between social intelligence, depression and some variables at university students

Abstract

This study investigated the relationships between university students’ social intelligence and their levels of depression. The basic research assumption was that high social intelligence would be in an interaction with low depression. It was expected that there would be negative correlation between subscales of Social Intelligence Scale: social skills, social information processing and social awareness. Two measures were used for this study. Tromso Social Intelligence Scale (TSIS; Silvera, et al., 2001) and Beck Depression Inventory (BDI; Beck, et al., 1961). 520 university students (287 female and 233 male) from Sakarya University/Turkey took the social intelligence scale and depression inventory. One way ANOVA and correlation were used to statistically evaluate the data. According to the procedure randomly chosen university students were divided into three social intelligence groups as high, medium and low by using the scores of Tromso Social Intelligence Scale. The research findings showed some significant relations between social intelligence and level of depression. Also some significant correlations were found between Social Skills and Social Awareness but no statistically significant interactions were observed among the Social Information Processing and level of depression. Finally, the limitations of the present study and the implications for future researches are discussed.