In the school a place in which adolescent who are destined to lead our society in the future is belonged, due to overflowing selfishness, the virtues such as consideration for other person, and providing help are now being diminished. To resolve this ...
In the school a place in which adolescent who are destined to lead our society in the future is belonged, due to overflowing selfishness, the virtues such as consideration for other person, and providing help are now being diminished. To resolve this issue, the education department of Korea adapted a volunteer work duty system. The volunteer work of students now has become a periodical assignment.
This institutional attempt is intended to provide the consideration for other person, empathy and finally, the motivation for altruistic life to the students. These attempts are based on an assumption that an experience of understanding other person, and other psychologic experiences such as satisfaction, and pride from a volunteer work may have a good influence to the cultivation of personality of the students. However there has been no study which investigated this issue. If we can know what influence can be given to adolescent through the psychologic experiences which can be earned by volunteer works, we can identify more detailed educational implication of these volunteer works.
In previous studies, prosocial behavior is known to have motive of helping, and empathy as major predicting factors.
In this study, we tried to identify the role of psychologic experiences from helping on the relationships between the motive of helping (self-oriented and other-oriented), empathy, and prosocial behavior.
To verify the purpose of this study, we composed following detailed study issues. First, the process of the motive, psychologic experiences and empathy affecting prosocial behavior was investigated. Second, we tried to verify whether the process we investigated in the first step is different according to self-oriented or other-oriented motive.
To verify study issues, measuring factors for variables were extracted by systemic literature review. The questionnaire was composed by systemizing these extracted factors. The printed questionnaire was distributed to high school student to collect responses for the prosocial behavior and its’ affecting factors and the influencing relationships and the degree of influences between factors were statistically analyzed. Statistical analysis was performed by SPSS 18.0 and Amos 18.0 statistics software packages. To verify an influence of variables, we performed regression analysis and in order to analyze influencing route and power, a path analysis was performed.
Through the statistical analysis, we deducted following results. First, we could develop a questionnaire with 28 items composed by acceptance of others, frustration and conflict, positive feedback, acquisition of trust, and pride through the statistical analysis.
Second, correlation and multiple regression analyses to identify relationships between associated factors which explain prosocial behavior revealed that the factors were correlated each other and also, according to each route of study model, these factors are affecting each other. Especially this study identified that self-oriented motive of helping has negative impact on the prosocial behavior. This finding did not matched with previous studies which suggested both self and others-oriented motive of helping have good influence to the prosocial behavior. Therefore, a follow up study on this issue may need to be done.
Third, we could verify a structural regression model in which revealed connections from a motive of helping to an experience of helping, from an experience of helping to empathy and prosocial behavior, and from empathy to prosocial behavior. Study model we set in this study was confirmed to be statistically appropriate and the motives were more likely to have indirect effect on prosocial behavior rather than direct effect. This result suggested that an experience of helping and empathy are stronger affecting factors on prosocial behavior than the motive of helping itself.
Forth, in the result of analysis of structural regression model stratified by self-oriented or others-oriented motive, there were statistical differences between two models. There was negative direct effect of self-oriented motive on the prosocial behavior. However, there was stationary indirect effect through an experience of helping and empathy. In other words, even in person who have strong self-oriented characteristics, empathy could be improved by experiencing helping and knowing other person’s hardship and motive to help other person could be also reinforced. However, in case of high other-oriented motive, psychologic experiences of helping or empathy showed relatively lower impact on the prosocial behavior, meaning that experiencing helping may have high contribution to improve prosocial behavior in adolescent with high other-oriented motive of helping.
The results of this study have an implication that we could find a usefulness of volunteer work in terms of humanistic education, through identifying an experiencing helping could improve prosocial behavior of adolescent with higher self-centered tendency.
Finally, we discussed results of this study and suggested the limitations of this study and necessity of follow up study.