Social Empathy Instrument

Overview: This poster will present innovative research regarding the Social Empathy Index for measuring empathy levels in social work students. This instrument is vital in understanding how empathy may be taught and learned as a phenomenon that encompasses the skills, knowledge, and values that are deeply integrated in social work practice.Proposal text: Defined as the cognitive, affective, and behavioral identification and response to another person’s thoughts and feelings (Baron-Cohen, 2011; King, 2011), empathy is essential in the profession of social work. Empathy is a complex and multifaceted construct, therefore the ability to measure overall empathy and the individual components that make up both interpersonal and social empathy is invaluable in understanding the progression of empathy as related to social work education.

The Social Empathy Index (SEI) has emerged as a highly reliable measure of social empathy and interpersonal empathy. Originally designed as the Empathy Assessment Index (EAI) measure of interpersonal empathy with the components of affective response, affective mentalizing, perspective-taking, self-other awareness, and emotion regulation, the SEI expanded to include the social empathy components of contextual understanding and macro perspective-taking in order to examine beliefs and behaviors corresponding with social responsibility and social justice ((Gerdes et al., 2011; Segal et al., 2012, 2013; Segal & Wagaman, 2017)). This poster presentation will provide an overview of the integration of this instrument in a recent research study, with significant findings for social work education.

Meaningful findings from this research study included the strength of the Cronbach’s alpha for the overall SEI instrument (α = .895), the interpersonal empathy subscale (α = .869), and the social empathy subscale (α = .882) for the pre-test survey. The Cronbach’s alpha was also very high for overall post-test SEI survey (α = .877), the interpersonal empathy subscale (α = .874), and the social empathy subscale (α = .817). These results provide confirmation of previous research findings that the SEI instrument was well developed and that the individual questions hold together for a consistent reflection of the empathy construct, subscales, and components.

The overall empathy survey instrument reflected extremely high internal consistency across the pre-test and post-test surveys. The reliability measures of the subscales were also very high in both surveys. For both the pre-test and post-test surveys, the individual empathy components reflected medium-to-high or high levels of reliability as stand-alone measures. The implications from these results are that the survey questions for the individual empathy components combine together as an internally consistent measure for each specific component, and the components group together well to comprise internally consistent subscales for measuring interpersonal empathy and social empathy. These subscales may be utilized for reliably measuring a person’s interpersonal empathy and social empathy separately or combined for an even more highly consistent comprehensive measure of the overall complex construct of empathy.

The research findings confirm that this empathy survey instrument provides the depth of analysis needed to examine the complexities of empathy as a whole construct through the interpersonal empathy and social empathy subscales, and in the individual empathy components. The findings from this survey indicate this empathy instrument may be used to isolate and assess the empathy components, interpersonal empathy, and/or social empathy, which can focus on what items to teach and train in order to build empathy among social work students.