An attempt to create a scale for psychologists’ self-care: A Study of the adaptability of the Psychologist's Self-Care Scale to the nursing profession

Miyajima, Hagiya, Mizuno, and Okada (2023, 2024) revised the items on the Self-Care Scale for Psychologists (Dorociak et al., 2017) to suit Japan and they created a Japanese version of the Self-Care Assessment for Psychologists Japanese (SCAP-J). The purpose of this study was to examine the applicability of this scale to personal support providers other than psychologists and to ascertain the characteristics of self-care for each job category by comparing those categories to psychologists. Nurses, who are required to perform emotional labor as well as psychologists, were selected as personal support providers other than psychologists. A total of 308 subjects (101 psychologists and 278 nurses) were selected for the study, and the SCAP-J and the Brief Occupational Stress Questionnaire were administered via an online survey. First, five factors were identified as a result of factor analysis of the SCAP-J for psychologists and nurses: “professional development activities,” “self-monitoring,” “interpersonal relationships outside the workplace,” “interpersonal relationships in the workplace,” and “control and relaxation.” The validity and reliability of the SCAP-J were confirmed for nurses as well, since the results were generally consistent with those of the SCAP-J for psychologists, α was .90 for all 22 items, and significant correlations were found between the SCAP-J and the expected indices of stress. Next, a comparison between psychologists and nurses showed that psychologists had higher scores than nurses on the self-care scale. In contrast, nurses had higher scores than psychologists on the stress scale. In addition, the results of correspondence analysis of the open-ended descriptions of self-care using text mining revealed that psychologists and nurses each had their own characteristic self-care. These results suggest that the SCAP-J can be applied to nurses and that self-care trends specific to each occupation may be identified by measuring and comparing the self-care of various personal support providers. This may be useful in supporting the self-care of personal support providers.