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

Abstract

This study aims to test the mediating role of responsibility and benevolence between empathy skills and the justice value of eighth-grade secondary school students. The study group, which was designed in the type of a multifactorial predictive correlation, consisted of 646 eighth-grade secondary school students attending 20 different secondary schools that were randomly selected.The research data were collected with 4 different scales "Empathy Scale, Responsibility Scale, Benevolence Scale, and Justice Scale" developed by the authors. SPSS vol. 22 and AMOS vol.24 package programs were used to analyze the data, and the data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, linear correlation, and mediation analysis techniques. In line with the analyzes, it was seen that there was a moderately significant positive relationship between the empathy skill and the mentioned values. That empathy predicted the values mentioned above in a positive way. In addition, it has been determined that responsibility and benevolence have a significant partial mediation role between empathy skill and justice value. It has been concluded that empathy and responsibility, and benevolence have an important role in teaching the value of justice in social studies courses.