Construct Validity and Reliability of a New Spanish Empathy Questionnaire for Children and Early Adolescents.

Maria C Richaud,Laura Oros,Viviana N Lemos,Belen Mesurado

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00979

Abstract

Empathy is a basic socio-emotional process of human development that involves the ability to perceive, share, and understand the emotional states of others. This process is essential to successful social functioning. However, despite its significance, empathy has been difficult to define and measure, particularly when incorporating both its emotional and cognitive aspects. The purpose of this study was to develop an Empathy Questionnaire for children aged 9–12 years based on a model of social cognitive neuroscience and to analyze its construct validity and reliability. This questionnaire aimed to integrate the following aspects: emotional contagion, self-other awareness, perspective-taking, emotional regulation, and empathic action. Three studies were conducted. Study 1 evaluated the discriminative power of the items and studied the underlying structure of the instrument using exploratory factor analysis. In Study 2, confirmatory factor analysis was performed to test the model obtained. Finally, the goal of Study 3 was to analyze the convergent and discriminant validity of the questionnaire and the internal consistency of its dimensions. The final version of the instrument contained 15 items that operationalized the previously listed dimensions. The results of the 3 studies indicated that the questionnaire had good validity and reliability. This study has important implications for research and clinical practice. Given its simplicity and brevity, this new self-report scale may work well as a screening method to evaluate the key psychological issues underlying numerous child behaviors that predict the success or failure of social relationships, individual quality of life, and mental well-being.

Highlights

Empathy is an indispensable skill for human beings, whose lives are based on complex social contexts
This study aimed to test the model obtained in the first study through a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA)
We only considered the dimension Perspective Taking, since the objective of this study was to evaluate the convergent validity of the new scale of empathy proposed in this work, and this dimension is the only one that would have a greater theoretical correspondence with it

Summary

Introduction

Empathy is an indispensable skill for human beings, whose lives are based on complex social contexts. The social nature of human beings is such that the recognition and understanding of the mental states of others and the ability to share these mental states and adequately respond to them are or more important than the understanding of and response to non-social natural contexts (López et al, 2014) This social and emotional competence underlies some of the most important human interactions, from the early bonding between mother and child to other complex prosocial behaviors (Batson, 2009). Recent advances in social cognitive neuroscience have indicated that empathy, as an inductive process, can be described and be measured This realization has led to significant implications for its conceptualization (Decety and Moriguchi, 2007; Decety and Meyer, 2008). The objective of this article is to construct a five-dimensional questionnaire of empathy for children 9–12 years based in cognitive neuroscience developments

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion