Psychometric Properties of the Swedish Version of the Compassion Scale

Abstract

ObjectivesAn increased interest in the phenomenon and process of compassion, in both clinical and non-clinical psychological research, has been seen in recent decades. In these contexts, compassion is frequently understood as a felt response to the suffering of others that involves caring and seeing the universal nature of human suffering, as well as an authentic desire to ease the distress. Based on the above, the purpose of the study was to validate a Swedish translation of the Compassion Scale.MethodThe manuscript reports on the analyses of the factor structure, reliability, and convergent and discriminant validity of the developed scale using data from two samples (n = 1712 and n = 353) of Swedish adults, using confirmatory factor analysis and correlation analyses.ResultsThe results show that the translated scale had the same factor structure as the original scale, with four distinct but related factors relating to the aspects of “Kindness”, “Common humanity”, “Mindfulness”, and “Indifference”. In addition, the results indicate that the developed measure provided reliable scores, both for the entire scale and for the different subscales. In addition, the performed analyses indicate that the Swedish version of the Compassion Scale generally showed the expected relationship to related measures of personality and individual differences in empathic responding. Finally, the results supported the predictions that women would generally score higher than men on the Compassion Scale, and that compassion would have negative correlations with both age and average monthly income.ConclusionsIn conclusion, the performed studies provide support for the adequacy of the psychometric properties of the Swedish version of the Compassion Scale, as well as for its congruent and discriminative validity.