Brechas cualitativas en la inteligencia emocional adolescente: influencia del ecosistema familiar, escolar y digital en contextos técnicos educativos.

Emotional intelligence (EI) constitutes a central axis in adolescent development, particularly in technical educational contexts where pedagogical models centered on discipline and technical rationality prevail. Grounded in Mayer and Salovey’s four-branch model, this study analyzes qualitative gaps in EI influenced by environmental dynamics. The objective was to understand emotional development and identify the impact of the contextual ecosystem (school, family, and digital) on adolescents at the “Eleazar López Contreras” Industrial Technical School in San Cristóbal, Venezuela. The research adopted a qualitative approach with a systematic immersion ethnographic design. The purposive sample consisted of 18 key informants, distributed equally into three groups: 6 students (aged 12 to 17 with diverse academic performance), 6 teachers from technical and humanistic areas, and 6 legal guardians. Data collection included eight non-participant observation sessions in diverse natural settings; likewise, semi-structured interviews were conducted, recorded, and processed in their entirety. The systematic five-stage analysis led to the identification of five interconnected findings: centrally, a pattern of relational emotional dysfunction was revealed, originating from an absence of emotional linguistic mediation, which prevents adolescents from cognitively processing their internal states. Consequently, an expressive polarization oscillating between impulsivity and withdrawal is observed, a dynamic reinforced by ineffective coping via invalidating modeling by adults. In parallel, within the virtual environment, validation vulnerability emerged as a new risk scenario. It is concluded that the socio-educational ecosystem acts as an inhibitor of emotional development, deepening the diagnosed qualitative gaps through the rigidity of its dynamics. Given this diagnosis, the imperative need is raised to design and implement future proposals such as the “EQpados para la Vida” program, conceived as a systemic psychoeducational intervention to strengthen self-awareness and regulation within this educational ecosystem