Psychometric Properties of the Santa Clara Brief Compassion Scale-Farsi Version

The Santa Clara Brief Compassion Scale (SCBCS) is a five-item version of Sprecher and Fehr's (2005) 21-item Compassionate Love Scale for Humanity (CLS). Santa Clara University has used the SCBCS over the past decade along with other anthropological scales for new students and graduates. But the SCBCS has neither been used nor measured psychologically in Iranian society yet. The present research translated the SCBCS from English into Persian and then determined the psychometric properties of the Iranian version. A sample of 237 women and 249 men (N = 486) was conveniently selected for this purpose. The face, content and construct validities were established where, convergent validity of SCBCS had moderate (r = .50) to high (Cronbach's alpha = .97) reliabilities. SCBCS had a positive and direct correlation with the Self Compassion Scale (SCS) and its subscales i.e. self-kindness, self-judgment, common humanity, isolation and mindfulness. SCBCS had a negative correlation with isolation and cloning, which was significant (p < .01). Overall, the findings of this research show that the statistical properties of the SCBCS are of acceptable relevance when it comes to the Iranian sample, meaning that the scale can generally be used with a great deal of confidence in Iran.