Comment on ‘Development and Validation of a Negative Emotions Scale for Public Health Nurses Engaged in Child Abuse Prevention Activities’

Dear Editor,

We read with great interest the study by Yokobori et al. (2025) that examined the development and psychometric validation of a negative emotions scale for public health nurses engaged in child abuse prevention activities. The authors addressed a clinically important and underexplored domain by operationalising emotional burden within community‐based nursing practice. The scale offers a structured approach to capturing professional emotional responses that are often normalised yet insufficiently examined in preventive child health contexts.

1. Study Design and Interpretive Framework

The multi‐phase design reflects methodological rigour and strong alignment with the established scale development principles. Nevertheless, the interpretive framework warrants further scrutiny regarding how exclusion criteria shape construct representations. By omitting participants without recent exposure to negative parental attitudes, the scale anchors emotional burden exclusively to active conflict encounters. In clinical practice, anticipatory stress, cumulative vigilance and residual emotional load frequently persist, even in the absence of overt negative interactions (Maleki et al. 2025). Restricting the analytic sample to recent adverse encounters narrows the interpretive range of the construct and limits the scale's ability to capture baseline emotional labour that influences readiness, resilience and professional judgement across the broader public health nursing workforce.

2. Statistical Validity and Clinical Interpretation

The reported factor structure and internal consistency indices supported psychometric robustness. However, the strong internal coherence of the retained items raises questions regarding clinical differentiation, rather than statistical adequacy. Although desirable, high internal consistency may compress meaningful variability in emotional responses across distinct clinical scenarios. In applied settings, distinguishing frustration linked to non‐adherence from fear related to perceived threats has implications for targeted supervision and interventions. Without explicit testing of how subscale scores diverge across differing case typologies, the scale risks functioning as a global distress indicator rather than a tool that informs tailored organisational or educational responses (Кузнєцов et al. 2025).

3. Data Integrity and Translational Context

The national sampling strategy enhances representativeness at the system level, yet analytic exclusions materially affect translational applicability (Krebs et al. 2025). Excluding nurses who reported no negative parental attitudes removed a substantial subgroup whose emotional regulation strategies and coping mechanisms were central to preventive sustainability. From a translational perspective, understanding why certain practitioners report a lower emotional burden is as clinically relevant as quantifying distress. Incorporating these profiles would strengthen the scale's utility for benchmarking workforce well‐being and identifying protective organisational or experiential factors.

4. Clinical Applicability and Individualised Strategy

The authors position the scale as a foundation for organisational support and training initiatives. For such applications, clarity on the score interpretation thresholds is essential. Without guidance on clinically meaningful score ranges or changes in sensitivity, integration into routine occupational health monitoring remains limited. Establishing interpretive anchors linked to supervision needs, burnout risk or service modification would enhance the scale's practical value and facilitate its longitudinal use in workforce planning.

5. Conclusion

This study makes a substantive contribution by formalising negative emotional experiences within public health nursing practice. Refining the interpretive scope to encompass both active and latent emotional labour would further strengthen the scale's relevance for clinical governance and preventive workforce sustainability.

Author Contributions

V.R.K. contributed to the conceptualisation, nursing and public health interpretation and drafting of the manuscript and serves as the corresponding author. P.V. contributed to nursing education and clinical context interpretation and manuscript review. M.B. contributed to scale development interpretation, validation methodology insight and manuscript review. All authors reviewed, edited and approved the final version of the manuscript.

Funding

The authors have nothing to report.

Ethics Statement

The authors have nothing to report.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Data Availability Statement

The authors have nothing to report.