The Structural Dimension And Construction Of Empathy Ability Questionnaire For Middle School Students

Empathy has great influence on the development of middle school students’prosocial behaviors and interpersonal relations. Thus, with every progress on research method, scholars are always motivated to study on the hot topic. In recent10years, owing to the wide applications of brain imaging techniques, the research on empathy has entered a new stage. The exploring of structural dimension of empathy has once again become the key field of academic researches.Based on the concept about empathy proposed by Singer, this research uses several methods such as literature analysis, expert evaluation method, questionnaires etc. to gather data and employs several statistics methods such as exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation model to analyze data. This research explores the structure of empathy of middle school students, constructs and testifies the theoretical model, and develops empathy questionnaire with good reliability and validity. Then, this research explores prediction of middle school students’ empathy together with its sub-traits on empathy response, prosocial behaviors and interpersonal relationship. This research explores the demographic effects on empathy and constructs questionnaire norms.The results are as follows:(1) Empathy of middle school students are composed of four factors:emotional perception, personal distress, attention, and perspective taking.(2) Empathy Ability Questionnaire for Middle School Students has good split-half reliability, consistency coefficient reliability, content validity, construct validity and criterion validity. It could be used as an evaluative implement on empathy of middle school students.(3) With empathy reaction as mediator, the prosocial tendency and interpersonal relations of middle school students can be predicated by empathy ability which was constructed with Empathy Questionnaire for Middle School Students.