PSYCHOMETRIC PERFORMANCE OF THE ?COMPASSION OF OTHERS LIVE´S SCALE? (COOL) FROM CHANG, FRESCO AND GREEN (2014) IN ARGENTINE ADOLESCENTS

LEMOS, VIVIANA; CHANG, JHY-HANN; KLOS, MARÍA CAROLINA

Washington DC

Congreso; 125th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association; 2017

American Psychological Association

Compassion implies a multidimensional process formed by an awareness of suffering; the sympathetic concern related to being emotionally moved by the suffering of others; the desire to alleviate that suffering and a response or willingness to assist in relieving that suffering. The COOL (Compassion of other´s lives scale) (Jhon Chang, Fresco & Green, 2014), aims to specifically operationalize the dimensions of: a) empathy (empathic cognition and affective component) and b) relief from suffering (intention, motivation, action). Given the limitation of not having an instrument for its evaluation in Argentina, the objective of this research is to translate into Spanish, adapt and study the psychometric performance of the COOL in Argentine population. The scale was translated and submitted to the judgment of expert judges. The resulting version was administered to a pilot sample of 129 students of both sexes, ages ranging from 14 to 18 years (M = 15.53; ED = 1.09). The discriminative power of the items (t-test for independent samples), the factorial validity of the instrument and the internal consistency of the scale were evaluated. The EFA results (KMO = .885; Bartlett´s X2 = 1701665; p = .000), indicated a one-dimensional structure; The factor extracted explained 38.68% of the variance. The internal consistency of the instrument was α = .993. The 28 items included in the adapted version were discriminative (p ≤ .05). The psychometric properties of the scale were appropriate, allowing adequate evaluation of the construct in our context.