Psychometric Properties of Compassion Scale and Societal Outreach Scale in Examining Professionalism Traits in Physical Therapy Students

Research Objectives: To examine the reliability, validity, and responsiveness of Compassion Scale (CS) and Societal Outreach Scale (SOS) in context of service-learning practicum (SLP) in 2nd year physical therapy (PT) students.

Design: This study used measurement/observational design. Students completed the assessments before and after SLP.

Setting: The setting included second-year PT students enrolled at a public institution of R2 classification.

Participants: Students enrolled in PT program completing SLP for their curricular requirements were recruited for this study. Fifty-four PT students completed the questionnaires pre-and post-SLP.

Interventions: Second year PT students completed a survey consisting demographic information as well as questionnaires such as CS, SOS, and Physical Therapy Core Values Self-Assessment (PTCVSA) twice within 1-week period prior to starting SLP. Subsequently, students completed a 16-week SLP where they applied content from the professional practice coursework, emphasizing regional health advocacy through student developed community interventions. The students completed CS, SOS, and PTCVSA after 7-days of completing SLP.

Main Outcome Measures: Test retest reliability of the SOS and CS was examined using intraclass correlation coefficient (ISS), where ICC>0.75 indicated good reliability. Concurrent validation of the SOS and CS was examined by assessing their relationship with different domains of professionalism assessed by PTCVSA. Lastly, responsiveness of the CS and SOS was examined by assessing effect sizes (ES) to indicate magnitude of change in SOS and CS after SLP.

Results: The SOS showed good reliability, whereas CS had fair reliability (ICC=0.57). Correlations of SOS items to PTCVSA social responsibility items ranged from 0.456 to 0.727 indicating moderate correlation for 10 items and a strong correlation for 2 items. The ES for SOS was 0.86, suggesting excellent responsiveness, whereas the CS demonstrated a small ES (0.35).

Conclusions: The results supports using SOS as a psychometrically sound measures for assessing perceived social responsibility in PT students and determining whether curricular components cultivating social responsibility are effective. The CS did not show acceptable psychometric properties and therefore, may not be suitable for assessing sense of compassion in PT students.

Author(s) Disclosures: Authors have nothing to disclose.