Factor structures of emphatic response and behavior among care providers for the elderly

Abstract

The present study was to identify factor structures of emphatic response and behavior related to the ethical behavior among care providers for the elderly. We developed a 94-item anonymized self-administered questionnaire, and distributed the questionnaire to all care providers for the elderly (n=3,142) from 76 organizations, which represented 28.1% of all special elderly nursing homes and long-term healthcare facilities (n=270) in Prefecture A. A total of 1,161 valid responses were collected (valid response rate: 40.0%), and exploratory factor analysis of the data yielded six factor structures that consisted of 20 items. Cronbach’ s α coefficient of the six factors ranged from 0.852-0.934 (overall: 0.904), confirming internal consistency for each factor. These factors were named as follows: 1) sharing negative emotions, 2) integrity, 3) sensitivity to emotions of others, 4) cooperativeness/compatibility, 5) sharing positive emotions, and 6) perspective taking and emphatic concern. Our findings indicated that all of these factors are valid and can be interpreted as emphatic response and behavior among care providers for the elderly. Integrity and cooperativeness/compatibility were specific to care providers for the elderly.