Abstract
Empathy is one of the skills that we need in order to understand the emotions of other people. Although many empathy scales exist, few are designed for children. The Kids’ Empathic Development Scale (KEDS) can be applied onward of age 6 and provide information about empathy’s affective, cognitive and behavioural components. The aim of this study is to present the Turkish validity study of KEDS and to provide a new tool that has satisfactory psychometric properties. Nine language experts made the translation and back translation form English to Turkish and vice versa. After that, the experts asked to rate the translation validity. According to experts’ opinions, the appropriate level of the items in the scale varied between 4.60 and 5.00 (X= 4.80, SD = .44). The results indicated that the Turkish scale closely approximated with the original. The scale’s language validity, analyses were performed on 30 (21 girls, 9 boys, average age = 9.5, SD = 1.17), bilingual students. Analysis, which was performed between the English and Turkish forms, showed that only the item I7_1 was found out to be problematic. Afterward, the scale’s language validity was ensured and easily accessible sampling method was adopted, and then it was applied to 293 (144 girls, 149 boys) students who were attending in seven different schools (four public, three private). Correlation analysis, which was performed to test concurrent validity, showed that there is a positive correlation (p < .01) between the total scores of Children’s Empathy Scale and Kids’ Empathic Development Scale. The results of variance analysis, which were performed in order to test if the empathy scores vary according to age, were significant as follows: total empathy score F (4, 248) = 3.10, p < .05, affective F (4, 251) = 4.70, p < .01, cognitive F (4, 250) = 2.6, p < .05 and behavioural F (4, 248) = 4.09, p < .01. Taking into consideration the gender variable not significant results were obtained. The results of the study showed that the Turkish version of KEDS is a valid and reliable, and has acceptable psychometric properties.
Highlights
Empathy is defined as the skill of an individual’s ability to understand and share the feelings of others (Davis, 1980)
Item functioning is examined using a combination of statistics, including infit and outfit Mean Square (MnSq), where infit MnSq is the information-weighted squared residuals and outfit MnSq are unweighted squared residuals
Both infit and outfit MnSq are a measure of the consistency that items are used by raters with expected values being close to 1.0, representing perfect fit between responses and the Rach model (Meyer, 2014)
Summary
Empathy is defined as the skill of an individual’s ability to understand and share the feelings of others (Davis, 1980). According to Adler, empathy is seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another, and feeling with the heart of another (Demetriou, 2018). It is viewed as an important part of communication (Barnett, 1990). Goleman (2000) stated that empathy is an important component of emotional intelligence. It is even more important to take into account the research on empathy
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