Open AccessValidation of the Romanian Version of the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (TEQ) among Undergraduate Medical Students
Author(s) -
Sorin Ursoniu,
Costela Lăcrimioara Șerban,
Cătălina Giurgi-Oncu,
I Riviş,
Adina Bucur,
Ana Cristina Bredicean,
Ion Papavă
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
international journal of environmental research and public health/international journal of environmental research and public health
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.747
H-Index - 113
eISSN - 1661-7827
pISSN - 1660-4601
DOI - 10.3390/ijerph182412871
Subject(s) - empathy , cronbach's alpha , psychology , reliability (semiconductor) , active listening , prosocial behavior , construct validity , clinical psychology , social psychology , romanian , focus group , applied psychology , convergent validity , construct (python library) , medical education , internal consistency , psychometrics , medicine , psychotherapist , computer science , power (physics) , linguistics , physics , philosophy , quantum mechanics , marketing , business , programming language
Medical professionals require adequate abilities to identify others’ emotions and express personal emotions. We aimed to determine the validity and reliability of an empathy measuring tool in medical students for this study. We employed Spreng’s Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (TEQ) as a starting point for this validation. The process was performed in several steps, including an English-Romanian-English translation and a focus group meeting to establish each question’s degree of understandability and usability, with minor improvements of wording in each step. We checked internal and external consistency in a pilot group (n = 67). For construct and convergent validity, we used a sample of 649 students. The overall internal and external reliability performed well, with Cronbach’s alpha = 0.727 and respective ICC = 0.776. The principal component analysis resulted in 3 components: prosocial helping behavior, inappropriate sensitivity, dismissive attitude. Component 1 includes positively worded questions, and components 2 and 3 include negatively worded questions. Women had significantly higher scores than men in convergent validity, but we did not highlight any differences for other demographic factors. The Romanian version of the TEQ is a reliable and valid tool to measure empathy among undergraduate medical students that may be further used in subsequent research.