Assessing and Measuring Caring in Nursing and Health Sciences, 3rd Edition

The health sciences would not be complete without a caring science. Although all health sciences focus to some degree on caring, when the public thinks about caring, nursing often is foremost in their minds. This book focuses on instruments for assessing caring in the nursing literature but is useful to all in the health sciences or healing professions. It not only brings to the forefront the various conceptualizations of caring but also identifies approaches to the measurement of the concepts that have been derived from multiple perspectives on caring. The various instruments presented capture the multiple essences of caring, which may be viewed as an attitude, an ability, an attribute or characteristic, or a complex of interrelated behaviors. The book provides nursing leaders, students, and scholars with an up-to-date critique and compilation of the most salient and up-to-date instruments to assess and measure caring. It brings together in one source the many approaches to conceptualizing caring and the instruments that have been designed to measure it. The book provides questionnaire development procedures, theoretical underpinnings of instruments, reliability and validity evidence, and descriptions of instruments and their sources. This updated collection encompasses measurements of caring that have relevance in assessing caring among students as well as patients and nurses, thus allowing use in both educational and clinical care research. Some new instruments focus on assessing caring at the administrative/relational-system caring level, address a new a population (e.g., family), and include novel potential techniques such as computerization. This collection of caring instruments offers a story of nursing theory and knowledge development, as nursing scholars search for and experiment with measuring or capturing the elusive phenomenon of human caring, often considered nonmeasurable.