The mediating role of responsibility and friendship between empathy skill and benevolence

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the mediating effect of friendship and responsibility between benevolence and empathy skill in the context of social studies courses. The data in the study, which involves a total of 646 8th grade school students from Turkey, was collected using the scales "Empathy Scale, Benevolence Scale, Friendship Scale, and Responsibility Scale" developed by the authors. It was seen that the research variables have significant positive correlations with each other. It was found that empathy predicts benevolence, friendship, and responsibility significantly and in a positive direction. Friendship and responsibility, on the other hand, were found to play a significant, fully mediating role in the relationship between empathy and benevolence. These results were discussed using the relevant literature and suggestions that were gathered.

The Mediation Role of Responsibility and Benevolence between Eighth Grade Secondary School Students' Empathy Skills and the Value of Justice

“…In the relavant literature, there are studies consctructing structural models in which empathy and social responsibility are the mediating variables, interpersonal helping behavior is the dependent variable (González & Lay, 2017), empathy is both the mediator and the independent variable, and helping behavior is the dependent variable (Carlo et al, 2011;Guevara et al, 2015;Schoeps et al, 2020;Wang et al, 2019). In the context of social studies in Turkey, two studies tested the mediating role of benevolence and respect (Sever & Bayır, 2020) between empathy skills and fairness and the value of friendship and responsibility (Gokalp & Inel, 2021) between empathy and helpfulness. However, a hypothetical model in which the variables in the study were tested together was not encountered.…”