The role of the gender sense of self and empathic tendency of students with normal development in the social acceptance of primary school students with special needs participating in inclusive education

The aim of this research is to develop a valid and reliable scale that can measure the social acceptance of the primary school students with special needs who took part in inclusive education by their peers who underwent a normal development, and to investigate their social acceptance in terms of various variables by determining the sense of self and the empathetic tendencies of their peers with normal development in the acceptance of primary school students with special needs who attended to inclusive education. In this research, scale development study group consists of 610 students who have a normal development and who study at the 3rd and 4th grades of seven primary schools in 2016-2017 in which inclusive education was conducted in the centre of Burdur district. The study group of relational and cause-comparative model is made up of 371 students who volunteered to participate in the application from schools in Burdur district in which inclusive education was being conducted in the 2019 – 2020 education year. The scale of social acceptance, the scale of empathetic tendency, the scale of sense of sense, which were developed in the context of this research were used by the researcher as data collection tools. In the analyses which were carried out in order to determine whether the study group of the social acceptance scale was sufficient, KMO value was found 906, and Bartllet's field test value was found χ2 2488.246 p < .05. As a result of the exploratory factor analysis, 20 items in the scale and 4 factors that encompass these items were found. In the first factor, 7 items whose loads range from ,734 to ,417 were found and these were named as "socialisation". In the second factor, 6 items were found the factor loads of which were between between ,711 - ,502 and called "empathy". In the third factor, 4 items were found whose loads vary between ,737-527 and named as "sharing". In the last factor, 3 items who load range from ,737 - ,538 were found and called "friendship". The total variance percentage of the social acceptance scale was found 46,860%. It was found out that the first factor explains the 28,358% of this variance where the second one explains 7,086%, the third one explains 5,786% and the last one explains 5,630%. As a result of the confirmatory factor analysis, the measured t value were found to have values between 4.79 and 13.31. When the variance loads of the scale factors were investigated, socialisation, empathy, sharing, and friendship were found to have values varies between .53-.69, .39-.61, .30-.62, .41-.53, respectively. These values show that the items are suitable for factors and so there is no need to remove any items from the scale. Among the sub-dimensions of the Social Acceptance Scale, index of distinctiveness were found below .80, and were found to satisfy the distinctiveness value. Fit indices that were obtained as a result of confirmatory factor analysis were found as Chi-square/sd=1,91, GFI=.92, CFI=.95, NNFI=.94, RMSEA=.51, SRMR .56. With these results, the four factor structure of the social acceptance scale was validated. The total item correlation that was carried out in order to determine the reliability of the Social Acceptance Scale .221-668, internal consistency coefficient .857 and Spearman-Brown double semi test correlation was found as .811 and it was found out that it satisfies reliability. The highest score that can be earned from the scale was determined as 60 and the lowest one was determined as 20. As a result of the research, a positively significant relationship was found between the social acceptance levels, empathetic tendencies, sense of self and their gender in students who participated in inclusive education applications and since the value of this relationship is lower than .90, it was observed that there is no multicollinearity problem. The results of the multiple linear regression analysis conducted in order to determine whether the empathetic tendency, self of sense and gender variables predict the social acceptance towards inclusive education students showed the fact that empathetic tendency, sense of self and gender is a strong predictor of the social acceptance. Furthermore, social acceptance was investigated in terms of various demographic variables and while there is no statistically significant relationship between the social acceptance of the students with special needs who participates in inclusive education and the employment status of the fathers of students with normal development and the education background of their parents, statistically significant differences based on the employment status of the mother, the number of siblings and the gender of students with special needs was observed. Keywords: Emphathetic Tendencies, İnclusive Education, Self-concept, Social Acceptance Scale, Social Acceptance, Special Needs Students