Scientists Turn Vague Culture of Care Into a Measurable 30-Item Questionnaire for Animal Labs

Ask anyone working in laboratory animal science what a Culture of Care is, and you will likely get a thoughtful but different answer each time. The phrase has become one of the most prominent concepts in the field, written into European legislation and championed by welfare bodies across the world, yet it has long resisted the one thing science demands of its concepts: measurement. A new study from Utrecht University and the University Medical Center Utrecht, published in Frontiers in Ethology, takes a decisive step toward changing that. Researchers there have systematically mapped how the Culture of Care is described in the scientific literature and built from that map a working questionnaire, the Culture of Care Barometer for laboratory animal institutions, with preliminary evidence that it measures something real and stable.

The concept entered formal law through Directive 2010/63/EU, the European Union’s cornerstone legislation on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes, which calls on institutions to foster a climate of care. Guidance from the RSPCA, the Laboratory Animal Science Association and the EU’s own working documents on animal welfare bodies go further, defining a culture in which all staff, from principal investigators to animal technicians, are encouraged and enabled to take responsibility for animal welfare and ethical standards that go beyond the bare minimum the law requires. Since 2016, an International Culture of Care Network has connected institutions pursuing that ambition. What has been missing, the Utrecht team argues, is a clearly described, literature-based way to actually assess whether such a culture exists on the ground.

The study unfolded in two phases. The first was a scoping review conducted according to the PRISMA-ScR reporting guidelines, the standard framework for transparent scoping reviews. The researchers searched PubMed, Embase and Web of Science with a Boolean strategy combining terms for the Culture of Care and related concepts, such as caring culture, climate of care and organizational culture, with terms for the laboratory animal context, including animal research, in vivo and animal facility. The search, run on April 10, 2025, yielded 155 unique records after deduplication, which were screened independently and blinded by two reviewers. Twenty-one publications survived full-text screening, published between 2007 and 2024 with a median publication year of 2022, and drawn mostly from the United Kingdom, followed by the United States and Germany.

What the review revealed was striking. Most of the included articles described the Culture of Care at a purely conceptual level, and not a single one used a validated assessment instrument. Eleven articles included some form of assessment, six using surveys and five using qualitative methods such as interviews, but the approaches varied widely in scope and rigor. A quality assessment of the four survey-based studies, scored against simplified criteria drawn from the SURGE and CHERRIES guidelines, found that formal reliability reporting remained limited and bias control was generally modest. One study developed a 12-item scale evaluated with principal component analysis; others reported internal wellbeing surveys or questionnaires distributed through emails and mailing lists with little methodological detail. In short, the field had plenty of vision and very little instrumentation.

From the 21 publications, supplemented by policy documents from the EU and the International Culture of Care Network, the researchers distilled nine recurring thematic domains. Compliance with organizational and legal standards was the most universal, explicitly mentioned in 19 of the 21 articles, reflecting the view among many authors that meeting legal requirements is the starting point rather than the endpoint. Next came a proactive attitude that goes beyond compliance, mentioned in nine articles, followed by strong and caring leadership and sufficient resources and conditions to do a proper job, each named in 13 articles. Empathy and respect towards colleagues and animals, shared responsibility and accountability, and transparency and open communication each appeared in 15 to 17 articles, while a supportive work environment and team collaboration appeared in 16, and sharing knowledge and continuous reviewing in 15.

Several of these themes carry a distinctly human dimension that has gained prominence over the past decade. The Culture of Care builds on animal welfare science by emphasizing organizational culture and staff wellbeing, and the review noted that attention has shifted from animal care alone to the people who provide it. Compassion fatigue, the emotional exhaustion that arises from ongoing exposure to animal suffering, ethical tension and high workload, can erode vigilance, empathy and professional judgment, and thereby feed back into animal welfare. A related scoping review cited in the study found that the most common strategy suggested to mitigate work-related stress among laboratory animal personnel was acknowledgement and validation of their feelings. The new questionnaire reflects this dual focus, with items on feeling safe to share emotional reactions, knowing where to find support, and still having energy after a working day.

The second phase translated the nine themes into a measurable instrument. The researchers drafted 50 positively worded statements in the first person and present tense, each rated on a five-point Likert scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree, a design chosen to reduce cognitive load and encourage reflection on personal experience. Four questions were adopted directly from the NHS Culture of Care Barometer, a validated tool from human healthcare, using both the original English version and a published Dutch translation. Eleven staff members of the Animal Welfare Body Utrecht were invited to rate each item’s relevance and provide open-text feedback on clarity, redundancy and translation accuracy; eight responded, with mean relevance scores ranging from 3.8 to 4.8. After discussion with three experts, items with low relevance, overlap or vague wording were removed or merged, leaving a final 30-item questionnaire covering all nine themes.

The team then put the instrument through a test-retest study, asking participants to complete the same questionnaire twice, two weeks apart. The first round targeted 50 laboratory animal coordinators at Utrecht University and UMC Utrecht, of whom 15 completed the first round and 5 the second. An open call in October 2025 on MyDALAS, the platform of the Dutch Association for Laboratory Animal Science with roughly 700 active members, and on the International Culture of Care Network added 12 more test respondents, 11 of whom completed the retest. In total, 16 participants completed both timepoints. Internal consistency was very high at both timepoints, with Cronbach’s alpha of 0.917 at test and 0.898 at retest, well above the commonly cited acceptable range of 0.70 to 0.95, though values above 0.90 can hint at some redundancy among items.

Test-retest reliability, assessed with two-way absolute-agreement single-measure intraclass correlation coefficients, told a more nuanced story. The total-scale ICC was 0.73, with a 95 percent confidence interval of 0.38 to 0.90, which the authors characterize as moderately good, and the wide interval is expected given the small sample. At the level of individual items, ICCs ranged from poor, below 0.50, to good, between 0.75 and 0.90, with broad confidence intervals. The researchers explain this variability through classical test theory: single items carry more random error, while aggregated scores gain reliability as that error cancels out. They also identified ceiling effects, noting that one item was answered almost exclusively with agree or strongly agree at both timepoints, leaving too little variance between respondents to detect meaningful stability. Item-level results, they caution, should be interpreted with care.

The study’s limitations are candidly acknowledged. The two recruitment rounds differed in timing and incentives, with the second offering a randomly awarded 30 euro gift card, and participants recruited through a network already engaged with Culture of Care initiatives may have been more positively inclined toward the concept, introducing selection bias. Response rates could not be calculated because the number of people who saw the open calls is unknown, and no demographic data were collected to preserve anonymity in the small sample. Still, the authors argue, the work delivers what the field has lacked: a structured overview of how the Culture of Care is described, a nine-theme analytical framework, and a questionnaire with initial evidence of internal consistency and preliminary test-retest reliability. The next challenges are construct validity, factor structure, subgroup differences and performance in larger, more diverse samples, including whether the tool can detect change over time. If those steps succeed, institutions may finally be able to measure the invisible climate they have long been asked to cultivate.

Subject of Research: Development and testing of a Culture of Care questionnaire for laboratory animal institutions

Article Title: From concept to measurement: a scoping review and development of a Culture of Care questionnaire for laboratory animal institutions

Article References: Weber, O. M., van de Kolk, S. A. C., & Van Loo, P. L. P. (2026). From concept to measurement: a scoping review and development of a Culture of Care questionnaire for laboratory animal institutions. Frontiers in Ethology, 5, Article 1796584. https://doi.org/10.3389/fetho.2026.1796584

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fetho.2026.1796584

Keywords: Culture of Care, laboratory animals, animal welfare, staff wellbeing, scoping review, questionnaire development, test-retest reliability, Cronbach's alpha, intraclass correlation, Directive 2010/63/EU, 3Rs, organizational culture