A study on empty nest syndrome among middle aged men and women

This study was premeditated to study the interactional effect of emotional intelligence, dependence proneness and gender in empty nest syndrome among middle aged men and women. A sample of 480 middle age men and women (240 male and 240 female) were randomly drawn from twin city of Bhilai and Durg. A survey method through questionnaire was used for data collection .Empty Nest syndrome of subjects assessed with the help of self made questionnaire of empty nest syndrome which was standardised before survey, Emotional Intelligence Inventory (E.I.I by Bar On’s 1997) adopted by Mishra (2000) and Dependence Proneness scale constructed and standardized by Sinha, (1975) was used. After ensuring the homogeneity of variance the scores of empty nest syndrome was subjected to 2 x 2 factorial design of ANOVA treatment to work out the main effects of the three factors viz. gender, emotional intelligence and dependence proneness. The interactional effect of emotional intelligence and dependence proneness on empty nest scale empty (F=0.875) which is also found to be insignificant at 0.05 confidence interval (p<0.05) therefore our first two factor interactional hypothesis that the subjects with high emotional intelligence and low dependence proneness would score higher in empty nest scale than the subjects with low emotional intelligence and high dependence proneness has been rejected. The interactional effect of gender and emotional intelligence on empty nest scale (F=25.446**) which is significant at 0.01 confidence interval (**P>0.05) therefore our second main hypothesis that middle aged male with high emotional intelligence would score lower in empty nest scale than low emotional intelligence middle aged female has accepted. The interactional effect of emotional intelligence and dependence proneness on empty nest syndrome (F=0.057) which is found to be insignificant at 0.05 confidence interval (p>0.05) therefore our third interactional hypothesis that the middle aged male with high dependence proneness will score significantly lower in empty nest syndrome than the middle aged female with low dependence proneness has been rejected.