A scale for assessing nursing students' emotional competence: A validation study
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Publication date
2024
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
Elsevier
Citation
L. Iván Mayor-Silva, Ramón Del Gallego-Lastra, Alfonso Meneses-Monroy, Marta M. Hernández-Martín, Ana M. Álvarez-Méndez, Manuel Romero-Saldaña, Guillermo Moreno, A scale for assessing nursing students' emotional competence: A validation study, Nurse Education Today, Volume 133, 2024, 106046, ISSN 0260-6917, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2023.106046.
Abstract
The wellbeing of nursing professionals can be affected by emotionally challenging situations. Emotional intelligence (EI) is a recognised ability to manage stress, reduce work overload, and improve clinical relationships and decision making. Therefore, these emotional skills should be identified and developed throughout nursing education.
Objectives
The aim of this study is to create an observer-based emotional measurement tool to assess the level of emotional skills in university students.
Design
This is a cross-sectional study.
Setting
Complutense University in Madrid, Spain.
Participants
A total of 415 first- and fourth-year nursing students participated.
Methods
The Situational Emotional Response Scale (ERES) is a questionnaire for observing emotional competence in nursing practice. It underwent content validation using the Delphi method with 6 experts, resulting in a final version of 34 items. Focus group sessions were conducted with nursing students to ensure readability and appropriateness. Participants completed the ERES after viewing two clinical interaction videos, resulting in two sets of responses. Half of the responses were used for exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and half for confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).
Results
A total of 415 nursing students participated in the study. Four factors were extracted, explaining 55.1 % of the variance. The CFA was conducted with 208 students, yielding a total of 4 factors and a variance of 55.1 %. The internal consistency of the scale was high, with Cronbach's α and McDonald's ω coefficients of 0.947 and 0.949, respectively. Test-retest reliability showed a moderate intra-class correlation coefficient of 0.604 (95 % CI: 0.503–0.688) over a 15-day interval.
Conclusions
The ERES questionnaire is well grounded in the theoretical framework of emotional competence as manifested in clinical practice. The empirical evidence provided by this study suggests that the ERES is a reliable, valid, useful, and innovative instrument for measuring emotional competence in university students.