The Measurement and Development of Empathy in Nursing by William J Reynolds

Author:William J Reynolds [Reynolds, William J]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138724358
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-01-16T00:00:00+00:00

5.2.4.5 The reliability and validity of the survey method

As with the interview schedules, care was taken to avoid ambiguous questions. The initial draft questions, which originated from teachers' experiences, were reviewed by supervisors and teaching colleagues for clarity. Next, the questionnaire was piloted with students on the empathy course (n = 18). As a consequence of doing this, some questions were reframed because they were not eliciting an appropriate or detailed response.

The revised version was piloted with twenty nurses on the empathy course. Responses in all cases were appropriate, specific, and fairly detailed. It was concluded that the questions were being understood clearly by the respondents.

In terms of the research environment, the importance of completing the questionnaire immediately following the clinical interview, to avoid memory lapse and bias, was emphasised. All respondents were able to do this during the pilot study, thus controlling an important influence on the reliability of the instrument.

The face and content validity of the instrument lie in the origins of the questions. The questionnaire and the responses elicited were scrutinised by teaching colleagues. They concluded that the questions represented the universe of questions that could be asked about the context of clinical practice during the empathy course. These issues were familiar to them from their experiences of supervising students on the course.

The richness and candour of the responses suggested that the questionnaire was valid. The detailed and specific descriptions of impediments to learning, and personal feelings about difficulties, encouraged the view that these data described reality. This impression was confirmed by similar data obtained from post-course interviews with nurses who had completed the questionnaire.

The final validity issue involved the approach toward developing the rules of coding data. A naive coder was invited to initiate a coding system for data obtained from the pilot study of the instrument. The coding system developed was based on her knowledge of the English language, and owed nothing to preconceived ideas of the phenomena being studied. This strategy reduced the potential limitation of professional bias, or a prior view, to some extent. It was possible to let the data speak for themselves. Weisberg and Bowen (1977) refer to this method as the contextual approach where a coder identifies the categories that the respondents actually use and employs them in the coding scheme.

Scrutiny of the coding system developed by the naive coder by the researcher and colleagues, suggested that numerous categories known to exist in clinical environments had been identified from these data. However, it could still be asked whether the categories within the coding system were exhaustive. By that is meant, the extent to which every answer to the questions fits into one of the categories. A professional research assistant was invited to examine both the coding system and the data. While the second rater did not disagree with any categories identified by the naive coder, she did add some new categories to the coding system, thereby increasing its scope to be exhaustive.

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