ADOLESCENTS´ SENSE OF BELONGING AT SCHOOL: THE ROLE OF EMPATHY AND INDIVIDUAL CHARACTERISTICS

Abstract

"There are many benefits of a high sense of school belonging (i.e., lower psychological distress), yet a lot of students do not feel like they belong to their schools. Many researchers have therefore tried to increase the sense of belonging in adolescents via different interventions. One of the recent review articles (Allen et al., 2021) discovered that successful interventions targeted students’ strengths and promoted positive interactions. One way these strengths and positive interactions could be targeted is to build empathy capacities. Although personal characteristics have been widely recognized as predictors of school belonging (i.e., age, gender, academic achievement, etc.) this does not seem to be the case for empathy. Only a few studies explored empathy components when addressing school belonging (i.e., Batanova & Loukas, 2014) and none, to our knowledge, have looked into empathy as a possible mediator of the relationship between personal characteristics and school belonging. The present study investigated the relationship between personal characteristics and the sense of belonging at school while investigating the mediating role of empathy on the relationship. A randomized sample of 1990 students from Slovenia (M = 15.35 years, SD = 1.23; 58.3% female) was used in a structural equation modelling to determine the relationships between the individual characteristics (gender, age, grades) and the Sense of belonging at school (OECD, 2018), while looking into the mediating role of both empathy components, namely, Empathic concern and Perspective taking (IRI; Davis, 1980). Results showed that all personal characteristics (gender, age, grades) are positively connected to both empathy components. Also, both empathy components (Perspective taking, Empathic concern) have a positive connection with the Sense of belonging at school. Furthermore, grades have a direct positive and gender a direct negative connection with the Sense of belonging at school. Lastly, both empathy components mediate all the indirect paths from the personal characteristics to the Sense of belonging at school, thus providing 6 positive indirect paths in-between. The model provides an insight into the important role that empathy has when addressing the sense of school belonging. Not only is it connected to it, but it also mediates the paths from the personal characteristics, which is especially important for the direct negative path from gender. Addressing empathy (especially empathic concern, which has the highest connection to school belonging) is advisable when trying to influence the sense of belonging at school."