A scale for assessing nursing students' emotional competence: A validation study

Abstract

Background: 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.

Keywords: Clinical measurement; Emotional competence; Measurement; Nursing; Students.