Development and validation of the empathy scale in patient care

Our objective was to construct a comprehensive and psychometrically tested Chineselanguage Empathy Scale in Patient Care (ES-PC) for use with Taiwanese people. We randomly selected 820 medical-care students and professionals who provided 789 valid responses to a written survey. After exploratory factor analysis, 23 items were derived, which were rated on a 9-point scale, and 3 factors were elicited: behavioral empathy (9 items; 44.73% of total variance), affective empathy (7 items; 10.99%), and intellectual empathy (7 items; 5.71%). The Cronbach’s α coefficient values for the 3 subscales and the overall scale ranged from.87 to.94, indicating internal consistency. Evidence of concurrent validity was also provided to support the external validity of the ES-PC. The test-retest correlation coefficient for the entire scale was r =.89. The findings proved that the ES-PC could be a reliable and valid instrument to measure the level of empathy in the medical cultural context of Taiwan.