Measuring Compassionate Decision-Making Processes in Adolescence: Development and Pilot Validation of the Youth Compassion Measure (YCM)

This sequential mixed-methods study describes the development and pilot validation of the Youth Compassion Measure (YCM), a scenario-based assessment designed to capture compassion as a context-sensitive, developmental process in adolescence. Grounded in a five-stage model (awareness, appraisal, affect and regulation, motivation, and action), the YCM was developed using youth-informed methods. Phase 1 focus groups identified common school-based forms of distress and key contextual factors shaping compassionate responding. Phase 2 cognitive interviews refined scenarios, prompts, and coding procedures to capture adolescents’ conditional reasoning and decision processes. This article focuses on Phase 3, which evaluated construct-to-design alignment, internal coherence, and preliminary relations to theoretically relevant constructs in a sample of 200 middle school students. Open-ended and Likert-type responses were used to derive indicators across compassion components. Correlations with validated measures were modest but theoretically consistent, with stronger associations observed for intrinsic prosocial motivation and goal-directed distress tolerance. Contextual analyses indicated that relational closeness and social-evaluative conditions significantly shaped compassionate intentions and action planning. Interrater reliability for coding was high (κ = .92). Findings provide initial validity evidence for a developmentally grounded, contextually sensitive measure and highlight the importance of regulatory and motivational processes in adolescent compassionate action. Rather than representing a final measure, this study served as an important first step in the iterative development and validation of the YCM. While correlations were modest, the findings generated critical insights into the processes underlying compassionate action and highlighted opportunities to strengthen the measure, guiding the next phase of refinement and validation.