The EmpathiSEr: Development and Validation of Software Engineering Oriented Empathy Scales

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12546v1
• Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2025 14:10:14 GMT
• Title: The EmpathiSEr: Development and Validation of Software Engineering Oriented Empathy Scales
• Abstract summary: EmpathiSEr-P, assessing empathy among practitioners, and EmpathiSEr-U, capturing practitioner empathy towards users.<n>Grounded in a practitioner-informed conceptual framework, the scales encompass three dimensions of empathy: cognitive empathy, affective empathy, and empathic responses.
• Score: 11.915544856845413
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
• Abstract: Empathy plays a critical role in software engineering (SE), influencing collaboration, communication, and user-centred design. Although SE research has increasingly recognised empathy as a key human aspect, there remains no validated instrument specifically designed to measure it within the unique socio-technical contexts of SE. Existing generic empathy scales, while well-established in psychology and healthcare, often rely on language, scenarios, and assumptions that are not meaningful or interpretable for software practitioners. These scales fail to account for the diverse, role-specific, and domain-bound expressions of empathy in SE, such as understanding a non-technical user's frustrations or another practitioner's technical constraints, which differ substantially from empathy in clinical or everyday contexts. To address this gap, we developed and validated two domain-specific empathy scales: EmpathiSEr-P, assessing empathy among practitioners, and EmpathiSEr-U, capturing practitioner empathy towards users. Grounded in a practitioner-informed conceptual framework, the scales encompass three dimensions of empathy: cognitive empathy, affective empathy, and empathic responses. We followed a rigorous, multi-phase methodology, including expert evaluation, cognitive interviews, and two practitioner surveys. The resulting instruments represent the first psychometrically validated empathy scales tailored to SE, offering researchers and practitioners a tool for assessing empathy and designing empathy-enhancing interventions in software teams and user interactions.

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