The effectiveness of an empathic communication skills training program for parents

The purpose of the study was to develop, implement, and evaluate an empathic communication skills training program to enhance the empathy skills of parents of high school students of St. Mary\u27s Academy, Pasay City.The subjects in the study were 24 volunteer parents who were given a pretest using the parents\u27 empathy questionnaire which was constructed by the researcher. The responses to every statement on the empathy questionnaire were rated according to the Empathy Scale of Gazda. Twelve subjects were then randomly assigned to the experimental group and twelve to the control group. The experimental group received the training for four Sundays consecutively. On each Sunday, the session lasted for 2 1/2 hours. Immediately following the program, the participants of the program were asked to evaluate the program to determine its effectiveness. A posttest was administered immediately after the fourth session to the experimental group using the Parents\u27 Empathy Questionnaire. The control group\u27s posttest was conducted one week after the training of the experimental group since the parents were not available when the posttest was conducted to the experimental group. A delayed posttest using the parents\u27 empathy questionnaire was administered to the experimental group after one month training. The t-test for correlated and uncorrelated samples was used to determine the significant difference between the pretest-posttest mean scores of both the control and experimental groups. The t-test for correlated samples was also used to determine the significant difference between the immediate posttest and the delayed posttest of the experimental group. The subjects in the experimental group who received the training were able to enhance their empathy skills at a significantly (p .01) higher level than those in the non-trained control group. The participants in the experimental group were able to formulate empathic responses at 3.0 level which is the minimum helpful response as measured by the Empathy Scale of Gazda. Although