Psychometric Assessment of the Karuna (Compassion) Scale

Abstract

If psychology is viewed as the science of human mind, the Buddha could unarguably he termed as the finest depth psychologist humanity has seen. As compassionate teachers, he focused his entire teaching primarily on the later practical aspect. He often mentions that he only taught only two things: there is unhappiness (dukkha) and there is a way out ofthis unhappiness. The root cause of unhappiness, he identified as the primeval ignorance Avija, which create the notion of'I' as individual entity, the doer, the feeler and the thinker. As the mind gets progressively purified it awakens from the illusion of personality and naturally abides in Compassion (Karuna), loving kindness (Mairty), Altruisticjoy (Mudita) and Equanimity (Upekkha) to increase degree. This research study addresses several major gaps in the psychological literatures. Two of these gaps are the use of young adult population samples and the dearth of relevant longitudinal data. Karuna compassion is virtue of an engaged Buddhist psychology. Karuna has a more significant role in Buddhist literatures Reigning measurers of karuna (compassion) have much theoretical grounding despite an extensive literature on the contours ofpositive functioning.Rational of the studyThere is growing concerned in our society that compassion is a dying virtue, gradually being strangled by narcissism, competition, prejudice, and revenge. Unfortunately psychology has been more concerned with negative aspect of life and neglected positive aspect. It's only recently that under the banner of positive Psychology human strength are being studied.Objective of studyTo analyze the Buddhist text and developed conceptualization and construction of assessment tool of Buddhist concept of Karuna (Compassion).ProcedureThe study is undertaken in two parts.Part-I would focus on conceptualization and assessment of karuna and Part- //would deal with investigating the correlates of karuna.A brief description ofthis part is given below.A brief account of the psychometric assessment of the Compassion scale is presented along with the employed statistical and psychometric techniques and the results obtained in this context. The aim of this analysis is to present a thorough psychometric evaluation of the Compassion scale and justify its use in the subsequent phase of the present research and in future researches. However, before presenting the results, a brief analysis of the characteristics of the sample is presented.MethodParticipantsIn the present analysis, data from a sample of 524 participants have been used. The sample consisted of 201 males and 323 females. The mean age of the sample is 20.18 years with a standard deviation (SD) of 4.79. Although the sample age ranges from 16 to 47 years, 97.9 percent sample is in the age range of 17 to 35 years. In terms of education, the sample consisted of 456 undergraduate students and 68 postgraduate and research students. In terms of residential background, there were 339 rural students and 185 urban students.Initial item analyses of the compassion scaleThe initial version of the Compassion scale had 84 items (see Appendix A-l). Item-remainder correlations, also known as corrected item-total correlations, were used for carrying out item analyses. It was decided to omit one poorest item at each run of the item analysis and continue this process till all the item-remainder correlations reached a specific cut-off point. The cut-off point of .20 was preferred. The choice of the cut-off point of .20 would be in line with Nunnally (1967), Nunnally and Bernstein (2010) and Pope (2009). Nunnally (1967, pp. 263-264) recommended that items having corrected item-total correlation of 0.20 be chosen and if the number of such items are in excess of the required number of items, items having higher correlations should be preferred; alternatively, if there are less items crossing the cut-off criterion of . …