Mediating Role of Emotional Intelligence in the Relationship between Hospital Perception and Fear of Medical Procedures in Children

Aim: This study investigated the relationship between children's hospital perceptions, their fear of medical procedures, and the role of emotional intelligence as a potential mediator. Material and Method: The population of the research consists of 4th grade students (10-year-old students) studying in primary schools in the 2023-2024 academic year. The study included 343 students and employed a relational-cross-sectional-descriptive design. Data were collected using the Personal Information Form, Medical Procedure Fear Scale, Hospital Perception Scale for Healthy Children, and Ten-Year-Old Emotional Intelligence Scale. Data were analyzed with IBM SPSS V23 and IBM AMOS V24. Compliance with normal distribution was examined with the assumption of skewness, kurtosis, and multiple normality. Path analysis was used to test the mediator model, and Maximum Likelihood (ML) was used as the calculation method. Analysis results were presented as frequency (percentage) for categorical variables, mean±standard deviation, and median (minimum–maximum) for quantitative variables. The significance level was taken as p<0.05. Results: The study found that children's hospital perceptions predicted their fear of medical procedures. Specifically, there was a statistically significant positive relationship between hospital perception and fear of medical procedures (β=0.565; p<0.05). According to the mediated structural model analysis results, hospital perception had a statistically significant negative effect on the mediator variable emotional intelligence (β=-0.327; p<0.05). By including the mediator variable emotional intelligence in the model, the path coefficient between hospital perception and fear of medical procedures was statistically significant (β=0.554; p<0.05). Conclusion: In the study, it was found that emotional intelligence, the mediator variable, played a role in the relationship between hospital perception and fear of medical procedures.