The term "nursing" is often defined as a therapeutic and interpersonal process that ultimately functions to help clients. In the process of helping, empathic ability(ability to entering into the another´s, feeling or motives) is an essential factor that has been proved in the fields of psychology and social psychology. In the sense, nursing personnel with high level of empathy is required to accomplish the comprehensive nursing.
The purpose of this study was (1) to investigate empathy between nursing and non-nursing students, (2) to examine changes of empathic ability in accordance with their academic years, and (3) to show relationships, if any, between the two concepts, empathy and need-affiliation.
For the survey, 325 respondents for nursing department and 378 from non-nursing departments were randomly selected from the two universities in Seoul. The instruments used in this questionnaire survey method were Hogan´s Empathy Scale and Mehrabian´s Need-Affiliation Scale, each of them has established its validity and reliability in many different people and settings.
For the analysis, descriptive stative statistics were mostly used by calculating frequencies, percentages and mean scores. T-test, analysis of variance and correlation coefficient were employed to test the differences and the statistical significance.
The results of this study are summarized as follows :
(1) There was no significant difference in empathic ability between the nursing and non-nursing students.
(2) The levels of empathy among the nursing students, surprisingly enough, were negatively correlated with their academic year, even though statistical significations was not found. The scores of the empathy are somewhat dropped as academic year going up.
(3) No significant relationship was revealed between empathy and need-affiliation.
In conclusion, the results of the study repeatedly support the claim that the nursing education must empathize and, also, include the programs that enable nursing students to develop the ability of empathy for their clients.
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