Measuring dispositional empathy in South African children.

Abstract

Empathy is a key factor to examine in development, because of its predictive associations with both aggression and successful prosocial behaviour. However, established measures of empathy for Low-to-Middle Income Countries, including South Africa, are lacking. In children, parent-report measures are key. However, a local study examining empathy and aggression (Malcolm-Smith et al., 2015) found poor psychometric performance for a widely used parent-report measure of dispositional empathy, the Griffith Empathy Measure (GEM). We thus investigated which of two questionnaires measuring dispositional cognitive and affective empathy perform better in this context. We contrasted internal consistency reliability of a simplified version of the GEM (SGEM; n = 160) and a parent-report version of the Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy (QCAE; n = 440) in a low-mid socio-economic status sample. Convergence between the measures and factor structure were also assessed. The parent-report version of the QCAE performed well as a measure of child dispositional cognitive and affective empathy, with good reliability (overall α = 0.90 vs. SGEM α = .63), and confirmatory factor analysis supporting the two-factor structure. The SGEM's reliability and failure to correlate with QCAE indicated poor psychometric performance. This is the first psychometric evaluation of the QCAE as a parent-report measure, and our results indicate that it should prove useful for future assessments of dispositional empathy in children across a variety of contexts.