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Children's Emotional Manifestation Scale: development and testing

Ho Cheung William Li1, Violeta Lopez

  • 1The Nethersole School of Nursing, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong, China. williamli@cuhk.edu.hk

Journal of Clinical Nursing
|January 27, 2005
PubMed

Insights

A new scale objectively measures children's emotions during medical procedures. The Children's Emotional Manifestation Scale offers a reliable tool for assessing anxiety and coping in pediatric patients.

Area of Science:

  • Pediatric Psychology
  • Child Health Research
  • Behavioral Observation

Background:

  • Accurate documentation of children's emotions during medical procedures is essential for intervention planning.
  • A validated and reliable instrument for this purpose is currently lacking in the literature.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To develop an objective, operationalized behavioral observation scale for children's emotional responses during stressful medical procedures.
  • To evaluate the psychometric properties of this newly developed scale.

Main Methods:

  • A cross-sectional study involving 82 children undergoing day surgery.
  • Scale development based on literature review and expert nurse input.
  • Psychometric testing included inter-rater reliability (Intra-class correlation), internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha), content validity, and convergent validity.

Main Results:

  • The scale demonstrated adequate inter-rater reliability.
  • High internal consistency reliability was achieved.
  • Good content validity and excellent convergent validity were confirmed.

Conclusions:

  • The Children's Emotional Manifestation Scale effectively addresses a gap in documenting children's emotional responses during medical procedures.
  • This scale provides nurses with a simple, objective tool for assessing pediatric emotional behavior and evaluating interventions.
Abstract

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