Empathy

Definition

The affective and cognitive ability to feel and understand what someone else is feeling.

• Affective empathy
• Cognitive empathy

Parent Scale

Please indicate how much these statements describe your child. (Not at all like my child-Exactly like my child)

• My child feels bad when someone gets their feelings hurt.
• My child feels happy when others succeed.
• My child understands how those close to him/her feel.
• It is important to my child to understand how other people feel.

Parent Scale Psychometric Properties and Fit Indices

We conducted confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to examine whether responses to the scale appeared to measure a single construct. Along with Cronbach’s alpha, we present model fit indices below.

• Alpha=0.87 (excellent)
• CFI=1.000 (excellent)
• TLI=0.999 (excellent)
• RMSEA=0.026 (excellent)

Adolescent Scale

Please indicate how much these statements describe you. (Not at all like me-Exactly like me)

• I feel bad when someone gets their feelings hurt.
• I understand how those close to me feel.
• It is important to me to understand how other people feel.
• I am happy when others succeed.

Adolescent Scale Psychometric Properties and Fit Indices

• Alpha=0.84 (excellent)
• CFI=1.000 (excellent)
• TLI=0.999 (excellent)
• RMSEA=0.033 (excellent)

Subgroup Model Fit

We tested the final adolescent and parent models with subgroups to examine whether the model fit for different subsets of respondents in the same manner as the overall sample. Using the same fit statistic requirements as the overall models, a check mark indicates that the model fit for the subgroup.  Household income is defined as “low” if it is less than the median income in the sample.  “High” household income indicates that the household income was equal to or greater than the sample’s median.

Concurrent Validity

Four single item measures were used to examine the concurrent validity of the adolescent scale: a measure of social behavior (fighting), a measure of health behavior (smoking), a measure of emotional health (adolescent-reported depressive symptoms), and a measure of cognitive development (grades).

Concurrent validity was examined in two ways: with bivariate and multivariate analyses. The table below presents the results of multivariate analyses, which control for: teen gender, teen age, teen race, household income, household size, parental education, parental marital status, parental home ownership, parental employment, and metropolitan area and region of residence. The beta coefficient of the relationship between the construct’s scale and outcome is presented.

The graphs below show the bivariate relationships between the adolescent scale and outcomes.  Results are presented for relationships that were at least moderately significant (at the 0.10 level) in the multivariate analyses. Note that the y axis scales are different in each graph.