Investigation on the Rationality of the Extant Ways of Scoring the Interpersonal Reactivity Index Based on Confirmatory Factor Analysis

As the most frequently used tool for measuring empathy, the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) is often scored by researchers arbitrarily and casually. Many commonly used IRI scoring approaches and their corresponding measurement models are unverified, which may make the conclusions of subsequent...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Frontiers in psychology 2020-06, Vol.11, p.1086-1086
Main Authors: Wang, Yang, Li, Yun, Xiao, Wanting, Fu, Yuanshu, Jie, Jing
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
confirmatory factor analysis
empathy
Interpersonal Reactivity Index
model-based reliability
Psychology
scoring approaches
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:As the most frequently used tool for measuring empathy, the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) is often scored by researchers arbitrarily and casually. Many commonly used IRI scoring approaches and their corresponding measurement models are unverified, which may make the conclusions of subsequent variable relation studies controversial and even misleading. We make the first effort to summarize these measurement models and to evaluate rationality of the common scoring methods of the IRI by confirmatory factor analysis, focusing on model fitting, factor loading, and model-based reliability simultaneously. The results show that most of these models do not fit well, indicating that the scoring approaches of the IRI corresponding to these models may be problematic. Relatively speaking, better scoring approaches of the IRI include summing empathic concern (EC) and perspective taking (PT) as the total score of the IRI and reporting the score of PT as cognitive empathy.
ISSN:1664-1078
1664-1078
DOI:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01086