Midwifery empathy scale: development and validation for a greek sample

Abstract

Background

In recent years, a growing number of studies report on the importance of empathy to women's care. The Midwifery Empathy Scale (M.E.S) was developed in order to study and record the levels of empathy of professional and student midwives. The purpose of our study was to validate this instrument and determine the factor structure and reliability.

Methods

The study sample (n = 242) consisted of professional (n = 114) and student midwives (n = 128) of 3 Maternity Hospitals (public and private) of Athens.

Results

The exploratory factor analysis on the 25 item of Midwifery Empathy Scale (MES) revealed seven orthogonal factors (KMO Measure of Sample Adequacy = 0.817 and Bartlett's test of sphericity = 1508.169, df = 300, p < 0.0001. The MES showed medium overall internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha value: 0.546, p < 0.0001). The internal consistency characteristics of MES demonstrated good reliability. Our findings attest to the multidimensionality of MES, and the Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) demonstrated that the 7 factor model offers a very good fit to our data.

Conclusion

Our data indicate that the Midwifery Empathy Scale (MES) is a reliable and valid tool for assessing the levels of empathy of professional and student midwives for both clinical and research practices.