Love of neighbor assessment: validity, reliability, and a template for measurement

Love of neighbor holds a prominent place in ethical and theological thinking across many cultures and world religious traditions. While arguably central to the promotion of societal wellbeing and human flourishing, little has been done on its empirical assessment. We present a measure of love of neighbor, grounded in a broader conceptual framework concerning interpersonal love, and examine its psychometric properties using cognitive interviews and analyses from datasets from numerous countries, cultures, and contexts. We present evidence for two distinct facets: unitive and contributory neighbor love. We discuss distinctions of unitive and contributory neighbor love from compassionate love, which might be conceived of as contributory neighbor love within the context of suffering. Psychometric properties of the measure concerning consistency, reliability, internal structure, relations between indicators, and measurement invariance are presented. The measure lays the foundation for future empirical study of the distribution, causes, and consequences of love of neighbor.