Abstract

Compassion has received increasing societal and scientific interest in recent years. The science of compassion requires a tool that can offer valid and reliable measurement of the construct to allow examination of its causes, correlates, and consequences. The current studies developed and examined the psychometric properties of new self-report measures of compassion for others and for the self, the 20-item Sussex-Oxford Compassion for Others Scale (SOCS-O) and 20-item Sussex-Oxford Compassion for the Self Scale (SOCS-S). These were based on the theoretically and empirically supported definition of compassion as comprising five dimensions: (a) recognizing suffering, (b) understanding the universality of suffering, (c) feeling for the person suffering, (d) tolerating uncomfortable feelings, and (e) motivation to act/acting to alleviate suffering. Findings support the five-factor structure for both the SOCS-O and SOCS-S. Scores on both scales showed adequate internal consistency, interpretability, floor/ceiling effects, and convergent and discriminant validity.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2020

Notes/Citation Information

Published in Assessment, v. 27, issue 1.

© The Author(s) 2019

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.1177/1073191119860911

Funding Information

This study was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust in a joint Doctoral Training Scholarship awarded to the first author (Grant ES/J500173/1).

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