Romanian Adaptation and Psychometric Evaluation of the Scale of Ethnocultural Empathy (SEE): Development of a Revised and Short Version

Ethnocultural empathy is a culturally specific empathy involving processes associated with perspective-taking, emotion regulation, and social cognition while considering the cultural differences emerging from interactions between people with different racial or ethnic backgrounds. This study aimed to adapt The Scale of Ethnocultural Empathy (SEE; Wang et al., 2003) to the Romanian cultural context and to assess its reliability and validity. Employing exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) on a sample of adult Romanians (N = 466), we obtained a 20-item three-factor revised version that fitted the data adequately. All three scales of the revised SEE have an appropriate level of convergent and discriminant validity, as given by Average Variance Extracted coefficients (AVEs), and good internal consistency and test-retest reliability. The scale was invariant across genders and age categories. Ethnocultural empathy, as measured with SEE, exhibited positive and significant correlations with general empathy, the cultural diversity within the respondents’ social network, Agreeableness and Openness to Experience, and negative correlations with Psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and behavioral intentions of social distancing towards people from other racial or ethnic groups. We further proposed a 9-item short form of SEE (SEE-SF), which is a more parsimonious measure with a balanced number of items within each subscale. Both scale versions are robust measures of ethnocultural empathy with good psychometric properties. Based on these findings, we discuss the practical implications of ethnocultural empathy skills in a growing multicultural society.