Empathic Tendencies of Pre-Service Physical Education and Sports Teachers

The aim of this study is to investigate the empathic tendency levels of physical education teacher candidates according to some variables. Study group consists of 117 pre service physical education and sports students (74 women and 43 men) of Kafkas University in the fall semester of 2015/2016 academic year. “Personal Information Form” and the "Empathic Tendency Scale" which developed by Dokmen was used to collect data. In the evaluation of data, firstly, normality hypothesis and Shapiro Wilk and Levene tests for homogeneity of variances have been used. In paired comparisons, independent samples t -test and in comparison of more than one group, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Tukey multiple comparison test have been used. SPSS 21 statistical package program was used and the results were considered significant at p <0.05 level. As a result of the study, it can be said that gender, age, class, place of education, parent education level and f amily monthly income variables did not affect the empathic tendency levels of the physical education teacher candidates.


Introduction
Good education is an important element of societal development.Education hav e many important goals and one of them is to train s ensitive and understanding individuals who hav e communication ability in society.It is possible by bringing the concept of empathy.Empathy has been described by researchers in different forms that determines relationship between people and social life.Empathy means, being aware of the thoughts and feelings of the others and thei r possible meanings (Solak, 2011).It is skills that both children and adults must hav e in order to establish healthy relationships with other people.For the development of interpersonal relationships, it is important that the individual can realize the feelings of himself/herself and others (Onder and Gulay, 2007).
Empathy has been defined in different forms in the historical process.Studying empathy throughout his professional life, the understandi ng of empathy Rogers reached i n the 70's years has today become a recognition that most researchers worki ng on the subject hav e agreed on.According to this definition, which does not have a sol id quality, empathy is evaluated as the process that, person puts himself or herself in the pl ace of the person opposite, understanding that person's feelings and thoughts correctly, feeling them and conveying this situation to that person (Dokmen, 2005).Barrett Lennard (1993) stated that this process took place in four stages while empathizing with the individual.The first s tage is an individual's realizing and understanding of his or her feelings; the s econd stage is establishing communication; the third stage is the individual's feeling that he or she is heard and unders tood; the fourth is the individual's self-expression (Mete and Gercek, 2005).
The concept of empathy is generally described as the adequacy of understandi ng the feelings of another person and psychologically perceive the role without impersonating (Barut, 2004).Those who have the ability to empathize are more s uccessful than thos e who cannot develop empathy; they get along well with other people, fight less and share more.People who do not develop empathy do not care about the feelings of other people.In addition, empathy enabl es the decrease aggressive behavior (Ozbek, 2003).Duru (2004) states that as the level of empathic tendency rises, the behavior of helping people also increases.In this sense, empathy should not be regarded as an activity that is merely beneficial to the person to whom empathy is shown; empathy is also very important for t he person who will show empathy (Dincyurek, 2004;Kocak and Onen, 2013).The individuals, whos e empathy skills are developed, also perform communication performances at a high level in business and social environments (Dogan et al., 2010).
Empathy for the teacher emerges as an important feature in order to know the student and to make a student-centered education or even to plan appropriate training for his or her group.The teacher should be both empathetic and clear in his or her communication with the child.He or she should be able to express himself or herself well and use communication skills to collaborate (Saltali and Erbay, 2013).When the teaching profession is compared to some other professions, teachers need to have more empathic skills.The most important part of teachers' roles is to create a positive and safe classroom atmosphere by taki ng care of s tudents, establishing empathic relations with them, entering thei r personal worlds (Akbulut and Saglam, 2010).Teachers should not expect thei r students to earn and us e the empathic tendency levels on their own; they should contribute to their development.
The relationship between the teaching profession and the empathic tendency is known to be of great importance for teacher candi dates who are s tudying at teacher trai ning institutions.In literature, Physical Education and Sport Departments have hi gh life quality (Kirgiz et al, 2004).Particularly, physical education teaching, which is achi eved with a special aptitude test and requires a certain amount of sports accumulation, focuses on unders tanding and interpreting students in the best possible way.It is necessary that physical education teachers also put themselves in the place of students and understand them to improve the empathic skills.In this sense, there is a great deal of work for physical education teachers and teacher candidates.When we regard physical education teachers as "self-confident individuals who are able to act appropri ately in any social situation, who can correctly and fully interpret the emotional expressions of other individuals, who are affected emotionally by other i ndividuals and empathically express the emotional states of others, individuals who have close, social or conversational skills to initi ate and direct conversations on any topic" (Avsar, 2004) improving the empathic tendency levels of students depends on trai ning physical education teachers that have these skills.
When the literature is examined, although there are many pieces of research made with the empathic tendency, the studies that are concerned with candidates are limited.Based on this, the aim of this research is to examine the empathic tendency levels of the physical education and sports teacher candidates in terms of some variables.

Research Goal
Screeni ng model was used i n this study.The ev ent, subject to the study is defined as it is in its own conditions.It includes data collection to tes t hypotheses or ans wer questions regarding the situation in the study (Nazik and Arl i, 2004).

Research Group
Study consists of 117 (43 men, 74 women) teacher candidates having education i n Kafkas University Physical Education and Sports Department in 2015-2016 academic year.Students from different class participated into the study (1 st grade 19, 2 nd grade 37, 3 rd grade 36, 4 th grade 25).

Collection of Data
The means of data collection in the survey were applied to the students on a voluntary basis after explaining the content and purpose of the s tudy.It was applied at the end of the exam on the last day of the fall semester midterm examinations.As a data collection tool, the Personal Information Form developed by the researchers and the Empathic Tendency Scale which was developed by Dokmen (1988), were applied to the participants.

Personal Information Form
It has been prepared by the res earchers to learn some of the variables of the participants who were thought to be influential in the research.The empathic tendency levels were examined according to the vari ables of gender, age, class, place of education, educational status of parents and family monthly income.

Empathic Tendency Scale (ETS)
Empathic Tendency Scale was dev eloped by Dokmen (1988) to measure the empathy in daily life.It is consist of 20 likert type questions and each one is scored 1 to 5. The questions 3., 6., 7., 8., 11., 12., 13., 15 are added up in revers e.The score is between 20-100.The reliability of ETS was achiev ed by Dokmen (1988) applying to 70 people for three weeks using the scal e re-test method.The reliability of the scale was found 0, 82 at the end of the analysis made.The scale reliability among participants' scores on single and double scales were found 86.The validity study of ETS was again done by Dokmen (1988).Calculated repetitive Cronbach Alpha value of the Empathic Tendency Scale (EMS) inventory applied in the study was found to be 0,771.

Analyzing of Data
Shapiro Wilk and Levene tes ts were applied to the data obtained from the study first to check the hypothesis of normality and the homogeneity assumptions of variances (P>0.05).Independent sample t-test was used in paired comparisons and one-way ANOVA.In all statistical calculations, SPSS 21 statistical package program was used and significant level was calculated as p<0.05.

Table 1. The empathic tendency levels according to gender variable.
In Table 1, there was no significance in gender variable based on the result of the t-test.(p > 0.05).When Table 4 is examined, the empathic tendency levels according to the class variable points do not show significant (p > 0.05).However, it is observed that the levels of empathic tendency gradually develop between 1st and 4th grade.When Table 7 was exami ned, there was no significant relationship between the participants' monthly income and empathic tendency levels (p > 0,05).

Discussion and Conclusion
In this study, the empathic tendencies of Physical Education Teacher candidates were examined according to gender, age, class, place of education, parent education level and family monthly income vari ables and the results were discussed.There was no significant difference empathic tendency levels and all the vari ables mentioned above (p > 0,05).
In his study Yilmaz (2008) examined empathic tendency levels according to gender and detected the empathic tendency points averages of the females (71.96±7.41)higher than thos e of the males (71.04±7,63).However, the difference between them is not significant.In the study conducted by Arslanoglu (2010) and Ekinci (2009), on teacher candidates and in the s tudy conducted by Karabulut and Pulur (2016) on sporters, they stated that empathic tendencies were significant in favor of women; Ayas et al. (2016) and Yasar and Erol (2015) did not find any difference between the genders in their studies.In their research, Turkeli et al. (2017) examined the empathic tendency levels of physical education teacher candidates who had pedagogical formation trai ning and they could not find any signifi cant difference in terms of gender variable.In a different study, Genc (2010), found that there was a difference i n the opinions of teacher candidates about the empathic skills according to the gender and teaching s tyles of their department.However, there was no difference in the empathic skills according to the classes, departments they study, the level of education of their mothers and fathers.In the study that Mutlu et al. (2014) could not find a significant relationship between age, sports age and em pathic tendency levels (p>0.05).Also, Yasar and Erol (2015) could not detect a difference in pre-school teachers according to age v ariable.The study we carri ed out s upports the literature.It is also an expected resul t that the empathic tendency l evels of the individuals whos e average age is close to each other do not differ.
In the research Ciftci et al. (2015) conducted; they could not detect a significant difference in the university first-year students' skills of developing empathy and according to thes e results, they hav e propos ed practical activities, semi nars and trai ning studies to improve the skills of university students to communicate and empathize.Tutuk et al. (2002) found that, empathic tendency levels of nursing students increases as the class level increases.Although there was no significant difference in our study, it has been s een that the empathic tendency average scores increased regularly when the class increased.It shows that the students in Physical Education and Sport D epartment are equipped with more advanced pedagogical formation knowledge and profession skills.
In our study, there is no significant difference i n empathic tendency levels accordi ng to educational status of participant' parents.Only in educational level of the mother, it has been revealed that the average empathic tendenci es of the participants, whose mothers are university graduates, are higher than other graduation statuses.Mothers having higher education level affect their children's empathic tendency levels positively.This result emphasizes the importance of the mother figure in child development.
According to monthly income, no differences were found in the empathetic tendency levels of subjects.In literature, some res earchers say that individuals with middle-l evel income have better empathy (Onay et al. 2015), while others say that there is no such relations hip (Carikci and Atilla, 2009).So, our res earch is valuable in terms of contributi ng to the literature.There are many other studies done i n the literat ure on empathic tendencies.Some of these are discussed in this section.In his study, Onay (2015) concluded that the empathic tendency levels of the prospective teachers differed significantly according to the department, in which they had education and family income variables; however, they did not differ according to the gender, age, and place they s pend their life i n.Yi gitbas and et al. ( 2013) stated that, heal th education students were moderate according to empathic tendency levels.Saygili (2015) detected that women teachers had hi gher lev els of empathic tendency than male teachers and married teachers than singl e teachers.Demi rci et al. ( 2017) conducted, they found that family attitudes were influential on the empathy tendencies of the child development students participati ng in the research.According to the survey carried out by T urkeli et al. ( 2017), the empathic tendency levels of physical education teacher candidates who got pedagogical formation trai ning were in favor of the graduates in the comparison between the participants who graduated from university and continued to study at university.
As a result; gender, age, class, place of education, parent education lev el and family monthly income v ariables do not affect the empathic tendency lev els of physical education teacher candidates.While issues related to the empathic tendency are conveyed to the Physical Education teacher candi dates, the adoption of methods through which candidates can put thems elves in the place of students during thei r undergraduate education, can help developi ng the empathic tendencies of the candidates.
At the end of the study, some s uggestions can be given.As Turkeli et al. (2017) mentioned in his study, teaching programs applied i n higher education institutions that educate teachers must support the empathic tendency.Learning strategies, methods, and classroom management that are effective in providing students with empathic tendency skills must be i ncluded in the activities.The number of cours es such as the drama given to improve the empathic tendenci es of the physical education teacher candidates mus t be increased or drama must be used as an expression, teaching method in which the individual is more active.Thus, teacher candidates can be trained as i ndividuals wh o can think scientifically and critically, and have the skills to develop creativity and participation.

Table 2 .
The empathic tendency levels according to "the place of education" variable.In table 2, no significant differences in "the place of education" variable based on the ANOVA test.(p>0,05).

Table 3 .
The empathic tendency levels according to age variable.

Table 4 .
The empathic tendency levels according to class variable.

Table 5 .
The empathic tendency levels according to "educational status of mothers" variable.
According to Table5, there was no difference found according to educational status (p > 0. 05).The average score of empathic tendency of students whose mothers are graduated from university or post graduate education is higher than the others.

Table 6 .
The empathic tendency levels according to "educational status of fathers" variable.

Table 7 .
The empathic tendency levels according to "monthly income" variable.