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

Area of Science:

• Nursing Education
• Psychology
• Healthcare Professional Development

Background:

• Nursing professionals face emotionally challenging situations impacting wellbeing.
• Emotional intelligence (EI) is crucial for stress management, workload reduction, and improved clinical decision-making.
• Developing emotional skills is essential throughout nursing education.

Purpose of the Study:

• To create an observer-based tool for assessing emotional skills in university students.
• To develop a measurement instrument for emotional competence in nursing practice.

Main Methods:

• Cross-sectional study involving 415 nursing students at Complutense University, Madrid.
• Content validation of the Situational Emotional Response Scale (ERES) using the Delphi method with 6 experts.
• Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were performed on student responses to clinical interaction videos.

Main Results:

• The ERES, with 34 items, demonstrated strong internal consistency (Cronbach's α = 0.947, McDonald's ω = 0.949).
• Four factors were extracted, explaining 55.1% of the variance.
• Test-retest reliability indicated a moderate intra-class correlation coefficient of 0.604.

Conclusions:

• The ERES questionnaire is theoretically grounded in emotional competence within clinical practice.
• Empirical evidence supports the ERES as a reliable, valid, and useful instrument.
• The ERES is an innovative tool for measuring emotional competence in university students.