Translation and Validation of the Turkish Version of JSE-HPS

Overview

Empathy, which can be briefly defined as understanding and feeling of one's thoughts upon experiences. It has been gaining importance in health care. A great majority of the literature has been focusing on the aspect of physician and health care provider yet recently establishing or measuring empathy has been performed with the undergraduate students. Since empathy and its related dimensions are important to integrate a better skill to provide in health care, measuring empathy gained attention. However, there might be lacking some tools which assess empathy directly such as the Empathic Tendency Scale and the Empathic Skill Scale in the Turkish language, yet these were discussed as cannot be quite modifiable to some specific sub-groups such as health sciences students. Thus, this study is aimed to study for the reliability, validity, and cross-cultural adaptation of the Turkish version of the Jefferson Scale of Empathy for undergraduate health care students.

The research has been aimed at studying translation, validation, a cross-cultural adaptation of the Turkish version of the Jefferson Scale of Empathy for Health Professional Students (JSE-HPS). Study Setting: This research was planned as a descriptive study. The research is planning to be performed between May 2020 and October 2020. The students who are currently studying in the Faculty of Health Sciences will be asked to participate in this study. Since ethical board approval was taken in February 2020 and study was planned to start in March or April 2020. However, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the research in which test and re-test protocols should be performed by students was re-planned by doing these protocols via internet-based forms. Before the study, all participating students were informed about this study. To achieve their consent in regard to participate in this study, a "tick-box" was placed prior to the questionnaire in which whether they accept that participating in this study voluntarily. The primary target for sample size was set as 300 students. Measurement and Method: The descriptive data will be gathered by using the Jefferson Scale of Empathy for health professional students (JSE-HPS), the Turkish version of Empathic tendency scale (ETS), and sociodemographic form in which age, gender, and other information will be requested to fill out. JSE-HPS: JSE-HPS was originally developed by Jefferson University. It consists of 20 items each scored according to the seven-point Likert type scale in which 1 means "Strongly Disagree" while 7 means "Strongly agree". The minimum and maximum scores range from 20 to 140. Higher scores indicate a better empathic aspect or vice versa. Empathic Tendency Scale (ETS): ETS was originally developed in the Turkish language in 1988. Turkish validation and reliability of ETS were also conducted and found to reliable according to the Cronbach's alpha value is 0.82. ETS consists of 20 items each scored according to the five-point Likert type scale in which 1 equals "Completely contradictory" while 5 means "Completely proper". Each item is related to some ideas which are quite common in daily life. 20 and 100 are minimum and maximum scores, respectively. Higher scores indicate a better empathic aspect. Translation and Cross-cultural Adaptation Process: The permission was granted from the copyright Holder of JSE-HPS in order to study the reliability, validity, and adaptation of the Turkish version of JSE-HPS. The cultural adaptation was performed according to the protocol explained by Beaton et al. Steps and a detailed explanation of this protocol can be found in the literature. Briefly, an expert committee consists of study researchers separately translated the original version of the JSE-HPS into Turkish. The final version of the Turkish translated JSE-HPS was created according to the separately translated ones. This final version was re-translated to English by a native English speaker who is also capable to talk Turkish language. The expert committee eventually made a final version to which can be applicable to the participants.