Virtual Empathy Scale (VES): Development and Psychometric Validation Among Indian Young Adults

This research was targeted at constructing and testing the virtual empathy scale (VES) that is intended to assess the empathy that is realized in the online communication between young college-going adults. It is based on multidimensional empathy models and is composed of three: empathic expression, cognitive empathy, and affective empathy. There was a generation of a pool of 49 items, and it underwent the face and content validity examination by experts reducing the pool to 41 items. Then we performed EFA on a sample of 421 college going students. This gave a 32-item scale, and good factor loading. We subsequently applied CFA to another sample of 331 students, and this supported the three-factor model, with reasonable fit statistics (CFI= .90, TLI=.899, RMSEA=.061). To conduct the reliability analysis, it was demonstrated that the results had high internal consistency (α > 0.87, ω > 0.87) in all three factors. The scale demonstrated convergent validity as demonstrated in high factor loading and composite reliability, however, the average variance extracted was a little below the optimal thresholds. And lastly, discriminant validity with some factor correlation approaching upper limits was determined with the use of HTMT. This scale has demonstrated high psychometric characteristics and is a potentially useful instrument to measure empathy in digital communication and can be used in a variety of psychological studies, online learning, and digital wellbeing intervention.Keywords: virtual empathy, digital communication, psychometric validation, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, young adults.