Abstract
The Professional Quality of Life scale is a measure intended to provide practitioners and researchers with an indication of a caring professional’s compassion satisfaction, burnout, and secondary traumatic stress. While this measure has been used extensively in nursing research, owing to the relevancy of patient-care associated satisfaction and fatigue within this profession, information regarding the construct validity of this measure is less well represented in the literature. We examined the construct validity of the Professional Quality of Life scale using a Rasch analysis procedure on each of its three scales, as a means of substantiating their measurement adequacy. Responses on the Professional Quality of Life scale from 1615 registered nurses (age x̅ = 46.48 years, SD = 11.78) were analysed. While support for the measurement adequacy (invariance, person/item fit, and unidimensionality) of the compassion satisfaction scale was found, the burnout and secondary traumatic stress scales did not demonstrate adequate measurement properties. We instead present an alternative measurement model of these subscales, involving items from each, to form a robust measure of compassion fatigue, and provide recoding, scoring, and normed scores for both measures. Our findings indicate that use of the Professional Quality of Life scale’s burnout and secondary traumatic stress scales may require caution, while our revised compassion satisfaction and fatigue scales provide robust measurement options for practitioners and researchers.
Highlights
The Professional Quality of Life (ProQOL) [1] scale is a commonly used measure of compassion fatigue and compassion satisfaction in the nursing literature (e.g. [2])
Given the intention of the ProQOL for use as a screening and research instrument, evidence of psychometric rigour is arguably valuable information to have available for practitioners and researchers. To advance this case for measurement rigour further, we propose that an evaluation of this commonly used measure [1] against the principles of measurement, via a Rasch modelling approach, will assist in identifying how the ProQOL measures the compassion satisfaction and fatigue of nurses, and whether it supports the intended construct structure outlined by the author
Starting with the items outlined by Stamm [1] as indicative of each dimension of the ProQOL, we conducted a Rasch analysis on each scale to find evidence of a univariate latent structure for each construct, monotonically
Summary
The Professional Quality of Life (ProQOL) [1] scale is a commonly used measure of compassion fatigue and compassion satisfaction in the nursing literature (e.g. [2]). The Professional Quality of Life (ProQOL) [1] scale is a commonly used measure of compassion fatigue and compassion satisfaction in the nursing literature The ProQOL is intended for use as a screening tool for the positive and negative aspects of working within a helping profession such as nursing. To this end, the ProQOL looks at two overarching factors of compassion satisfaction and compassion fatigue.
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