Positive and Negative Oriented Cognitive, Affective and Somatic Empathy Scale: Child and Adolescent Edition Adaptation to Turkish Culture

In recent years, one of the concepts of psychology, which is the subject of many researches, is empathy. In the most recent publications, new ideas have been put forward on the dimensions and types of empathy, and somatic empathy has been included in cognitive and affective empathy. Raine and Chen (2018), also suggested that empathy had negative and positive dimensions and developed a means for measuring negative and positive dimensions of cognitive, affective and somatic empathy for children. The aim of this study was to adapt the The Cognitive, Affective, and Somatic Empathy Scales -CASES- for Children, developed by Raine and Chen (2018) into Turkish culture. The sampling of the research included in 402 and 305 students who are study in 7th grade. As a data collection tool, in addition to “The Cognitive, Affective, and Somatic Empathy Scales for Children”, “Empathy Scale for Children” was used in order to examine compliance validity. In the data analysis, the suitability of the number of samples for the factor analysis was examined by the Kaiser-Mayer-Olkin (KMO) coefficient and the multivariate normality of the data was examined by Bartlett Test. Significance of road coefficients was examined by T-Test, and AFA and DFA analyzes were performed to prove the structure validity of the scale. At the end of the research, two, three and six-dimensional structure of the scale is proven, for all dimensions; Chi-square, CMIN / DF, NFI, TLI, IFI, RMSEA, GFI, AGFI, RMR indexes were found to be quite good. The internal consistency coefficients calculated for each dimension and scale vary between 0.882 and 0.973. In addition, it was found that the scale had gender invariance feature. Besides, it was found that there was a positive correlation between the adapted scale and the Empathy Scale for Children, which was used to search for evidence of compliance validity at p<0.001 and p<0.05 levels. As a result, it was concluded that the with the multidimensional structure of Positive and Negative Oriented Cognitive, Affective and Somatic Empathy Scale: Child and Adolescent Edition is a valid and reliable means that can be used by psychologists, psychological counselors and researchers