Abstract:

Social work is a helping profession that, as other professions working with people, aims to achieve social change by increasing an individual’s social functioning, enhancing and maintaining people’s wellbeing. In previous researches on the importance of empathy in social work practices and its efect on the helping behavior usually have found that empathy has a signiicant efect on the helping behavior. In conclusion, empathy and helping mean scores of women were determined to be higher than men. “Compassionate contextual assessment (CCA)” sub-scale was shown to cause a signiicant diference in terms of the gender variable. According to these indings, female social workers showed more empathic reactions than men with respect to compassion (p<0,05). Mean scores of empathy and helping among the social workers who had postgraduate professional education, was found to be higher. With the increase of work experience and the age of social workers, there was decrease in helping behavior but an increase in empathy skills. his research shows that empathy and helping behavior can be improved by education and makes pertinent recommendations and suggestions to social workers, social workers’ associations and academicians accordingly.

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