Development of the Jefferson Scale of Empathy for Teachers (JSE-T) to Measure Empathy in Educationally Relevant Situations

Abstract

The Jefferson Scale of Empathy is one of the most commonly used scales in medical education to measure empathy. It is specific to the field of medical education and geared toward orienting medical students to physician empathy in patient care situations. The scale was transferred to the educational context in teacher education. In doing so, the questionnaire was reduced from the original 20 items to 9 because of content and methodological issues. A CFA showed good model-fit parameters for a three-factor model, and correlations with the German version of the Interpersonal reactivity Index were in line with the magnitudes reported in previous literature. In total, the JST-E scales show evidence for their factorial and convergent validity and their reliability. The JSE-T proves to be a good instrument for measuring empathy in educational contexts and thus closes the gap between trait measurement procedures such as the IRI and concrete-situational judgment tests, so that an economical, multidimensional testing of empathy becomes possible.