Development and initial psychometric testing of a new instrument for assessing empathetic clinical gaze among medical students

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new tool to measure empathetic clinical gaze in medical students, aiming to improve patient-physician communication.

Contribution

The novel contribution is the development and initial validation of a 16-item scale for assessing empathetic clinical gaze.

Findings

The 16-item EMG scale showed good reliability with a Cronbach's alpha of 0.87.

Exploratory factor analysis supported a unidimensional structure of the scale.

Item-total correlations ranged from 0.37 to 0.60, indicating acceptable item performance.

Abstract

The traditional scientific medical “gaze” often promotes a detached form of clinical empathy that hinders effective communication between physicians and patients, neglecting the emotional dimensions of patient experiences. Although empathy involves both cognitive and emotional components, there is a notable lack of assessment tools that treat clinical empathy as a unified attribute. To address this gap, the concept of empathetic medical gaze (EMG) is proposed and an associated scale was developed, designed to assess medical students’ and practitioners’ genuine interest in patients through emotional attunement.

An initial study was conduct to test the basic psychometric properties of the EMG scale. A 20-item instrument was created and assessed among 251 medical students in Sweden.

Item and exploratory factor analyses yielded a 16-item scale, which demonstrated good reliability (α = 0.87), corrected item-total correlations ranging from 0.37 to 0.60 and a single factor solution, thereby supporting unidemensionality and the use of a total empathetic clinical gaze score.

Future research is needed to explore refinement of the omitted items, test additional psychometric properties (e.g., test-retest stability, external construct validity) and apply more advanced psychometric methods, such as Rasch measurement theory, to further improve the understanding and assessment of this empathetic attribute.