Social Work Intervention Study On Improving Empathy Ability Of Rural Children

Rural children live in a special environment In which their main caregivers are not well-educated.It is difficult for them to respond to the children’s higher needs,which may lead to the children’s taciturn,withdrawn personality,inferiority complex,and difficulties in social interaction or lack of skills.These could seriously affect the development of children’s empathy.If not intervened in time,it will increase the risk of children falling into bad interpersonal relationships and ultimately affect their overall development.Therefore,it is necessary to provide empathic intervention to rural children and cultivate their empathic ability.On the basis of clarifying the theory of empathy development for rural children,this study applied the lifelong development model of empathy and the theory of skill acquisition to guide empathy intervention.First,theoretical knowledge was learned,then situational model was conducted,and finally an intervention manual was formed.This study adopted a quasi-experimental design,and selected 10 girls and 10 boys from the fifth grade of S Primary School in Z County of Chongqing,according to gender,age,basic cognitive ability and other criteria.Boys and girls were randomly assigned to the experimental group and the control group.The experimental group(5 boys and 5 girls)received supervised cognitive empathy and affective empathy interventions for half a month in group work.The control group did not receive any intervention.Both groups completed pre-test and post-test of the Cognitive and Affective Empathy Scale for Chinese Adolescents.After the intervention,the Mann-Whitney U test and Wilcoxon rank sum test were performed on the pre-and post-intervention data,and the following conclusions were drawn:(1)There were no significant differences in cognitive empathy and affective empathy scores between the experimental group and the control group before the intervention,but significant differences in empathy scores in both dimensions between the experimental group and the control group after the intervention.(2)The post-intervention scores of cognitive empathy and affective empathy were significantly higher than those before test;While the control group had no significant change in the scores before and after the intervention.Empathy intervention significantly improved the empathy ability of rural children.On the basis of clarifying the cognitive and affective structure of empathy and drawing the lifelong development model of empathy,this study proposed that there were primary affective empathy and higher affective empathy forms,and clarified the important role of cognitive empathy in cultivating higher affective empathy.Combined with the theory of skill acquisition,the occurrence process of cognitive empathy and affective empathy was analyzed,the five-step model of empathic response was summarized,and the operation process of empathic ability cultivation was clarified.This study changed the perspective of children’s empathy intervention,and found that it is feasible and effective to improve children’s affective empathy by intervening cognitive empathy,and finally improve the overall level of empathy ability.At the same time,a detailed intervention manual has been formed,which can provide reference for future social work empathy intervention.