Study On Chinese Version Of The Jefferson Scale Of Empathy-Health Professionals(JSE-HP) In Nurses

Objective:Empathy is one of the focuses studied by nurse researchers recently.Researchers agree empathy has a positive role in improving nurse-patient relationship and in clinical outcomes of patients.We need a stable and effective instrument to study nurses empathy.JSE-HP(the Jefferson Scale of Empathy-health Professionals) scale developed by Mohammadreza Hojat and his teams at the Center for research in Medical Education and Health Care at Jefferson Medical College in 2001 to measure empathy in health professionals has been translated into 17 languages.We introduce JSE-HP scale into China to study empathy in Chinese nurses.This study is to develop the Chinese version of Jefferson Scale of Empathy-Health Professionals and test the reliability and validity of JSE-HP in nurses.Methods:The English version of JSE-HP was translated and back-translated,as well as cross-cultural adapted by the method of psychometrics to develop the Chinese version of JSE-HP. A total of 1100 nurses was selected from 8 hospitals in Shanxi Province and surveyed by the Chinese version of JSE-HP and IRI-C.Fomal psychometric properties of the scale were tested according to the survey through SPSS.Results:1.The internal consistency cofficient of JSE-HP was 0.750.The split-half reliability cofficient was 0.771.The test-retest reliability cofficient was 0.659.The item-scale correlation ranged from 0.336～0.546 The factor analysis of JSE-HP resulted in three factors which accounted for 37.344%of the scale's total variances.A statistically significant correlation was found between scores of the JSE-HP and IRI-C(r=0.652,P＜0.01).2.There are sigineficant differences on empathy scores between different hospitals,departments and educational backgrounds.No differences were found between ages,job titles and duties.Conclusion:The Chinese version of JSE-HP demonstrated good reliability and validity. Sufficient discriminative and evaluative psychometric properties of the Chinese version of JSE-HP made the instrument suitable for study on empathy for Chinese nurses,and provided theoretical evidence for its future use.