Social empathy: how social work educators perceive and intend to engage in social justice

ABSTRACT

Social work education is designed and devoted to the dissemination, cultivation, and promotion of social justice. Based on the social empathy model that promotes social justice and utilizing primary survey data collected online from a sample of 199 social work educators in the U.S. this study explored the associations between social empathy and attitudes toward social justice (ATSJ) and intentions to engage in social justice (IESJ). The dependent variables ATSJ and IESJ were based on two subscales from the Social Justice Scale, and the independent variable social empathy was based on the Interpersonal and Social Empathy Index. Findings suggest that social work educators with higher level of social empathy have more positive attitudes toward social justice and higher level of intentions to engage in social justice. The study concludes that social empathy is significantly associated with attitudes toward social justice and intentions to engage in social justice and supports the social empathy model that promotes social justice. This study sheds light upon future research on the construct of social justice and calls for more initiatives promoting social justice in social work education, such as curricula reforms and faculty development programs based on the social empathy framework.

KEYWORDS:

• Social empathy
• social justice
• social work educators
• attitudes
• intentions

Acknowledgement

The author acknowledges financial support from the University of Maryland Social Work PhD Program to complete this study. I would like to thank Profs. Elizabeth Segal and Susan Torres-Harding for allowing me to use the Interpersonal and Social Empathy Index and the Social Justice Scale respectively. I would also like to express my gratitude to Dr. Bethany Lee and the anonymous assessors for their review and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, L.P., upon request.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lujie Peng

LujiePeng is currently a doctoral student and adjunct professor in the University of Maryland School of Social Work. He earned his Master of Social Work from Nanjing University in 2016. His scholarly interest focuses on public attitudes towards government responsibility for social welfare (welfare attitudes) with special attention to underrepresented and underserved populations. His research addresses both the longitudinal changes of Americans’ welfare attitudes and the improvement of the conceptualization, operationalization, and measurement of welfare attitudes based on nationally representative social surveys. His research agenda was originally informed by his academic experiences examining the extension of Esping-Andersen’s classification of the three worlds of welfare capitalism to the East Asian context. Lujie is passionately interested in advanced statistical methods, such as multi-level modelling, structural equation modelling, and Bayesian statistics. He is currently planning to develop a Welfare Attitudes Scale (WAS) and examine its psychometric properties based on the US population. Lujie is currently a Standing Committee Member of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee of the University of Maryland School of Social Work.