Psychometric Properties of the Santa Clara Brief Compassion Scale

The Santa Clara Brief Compassion Scale (SCBCS) is a five-item scale intended to operationalize and measure compassion. Santa Clara University has been administering the SCBCS, along with other demographic questions, to all new entering as well as exiting graduating students for the past decade. Previous research has utilized compassion scores and demographic data collected from these surveys in both between and within-subject designs to examine compassion among these undergraduate students. The purpose of the current study was to examine the reliability and validity of the SCBCS through various psychometric tests utilizing 6,763 responses that have been collected in recent years. Internal reliability, split-half reliability, and test/re-test reliability findings suggest that the SCBCS is a reliable scale. Tests for convergent and divergent validity, as well as a factor analysis, propose that the scale is valid and is appropriate for its intended use of measuring self-reported compassion.