Ethnocultural Empathy Measurement, psychometric properties, and differences between students in health care education programmes

Abstract: The aim of this thesis is to investigate empathy for persons from ethnical groups different than one’s own, an ability called ethnocultural empathy. A scale measuring ethnocultural empathy was translated and validated for a Swedish context and tested in a student sample, a majority of which were healthcare students. Three studies were performed. In study I, the validity and reliability of a Swedish translation of the Scale of Ethnocultural Empathy (SEE) was investigated (N=326). The purpose of study II was to investigate the association between basic empathy as measured by the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (Davis, 1983) and ethnocultural empathy as measured by the Scale of Ethnocultural Empathy (Wang et al., 2003). In study III, differences in basic empathy as well as in ethnocultural empathy were explored in a sample of 365 undergraduate students at the beginning and end of four Master programmes in health care education (Medicine, Psychology, Nursing and Social Work). The main results from the present thesis indicate that the central tendency, distribution of scores, intercorrelations, and factor structure in the Swedish version of SEE were well-matched and mainly similar to the American version. A significant strong correlation between basic and ethnocultural empathy was found, suggesting that the two constructs overlap substantially. The results of study III revealed that students from all programmes in health care had fairly high scores on both empathy scales. There were, however, significant differences between the study programmes. Overall, the studies show that ethnocultural empathy is a measurable construct but that it overlaps with basic empathy and further testing of the construct is needed. Implications of the findings for the measurement of empathy are discussed.