The Validity and Reliability of Farsi Version of the Compassion of Other's Lives (COOL) Scale

Compassion is an interpersonal construct that has important role in individual's wellbeing. The main purpose of this study was to examine the validity and reliability of The Compassion of Other's Lives Scale (COOL scale). To this end, 281 students (170 women and 90 men with an average age of 23.4) from Payame Noor University of Guilan were selected by multi-stage cluster sampling. They answered The Compassion of Others’ Lives Scale (Chang et al., 2014), The Emotional Empathy Scale (Mehrabian and Epstein, 1972) and The Sadistic Personality Subscale of Millon Personality Inventory. The results of exploratory factor analysis showed that two factors, empathy and alleviating suffering, predicted approximately 50 percent of the variance and confirmatory factor analysis indicated that these factors were well fitted to the data (CFI= 0.91, NFI= 0.88, GFI=0.94). The convergent and divergent validity of the scale were examined by correlating with Emotional Empathy Scale and Sadistic Personality Subscale and the results showed significant correlation (P< 0.01). The internal consistency of the scale was calculated by Cronbach's alpha (0.87), and the correlation of items with the total score was obtained in the range of 0.41 to 0.60. According to the results, it can be concluded that the Compassion of Other's lives Scale has a good validity and reliability for Iranian samples and can be used in future studies.