A mixed pattern research on the evaluation of empathy, attitudes and self-sensitivity towards the disabled of the adapted movement education program in secondary school students

This thesis was carried out with the aim of evaluating the empathy, attitude and self-compassion towards disabled people in secondary school students of the Adapted Movement Education Program (UHEP). The research was conducted with a mixed research methods intervention design. In the quantitative section, there are a total of 50 secondary school students, 25 in the experimental group and 25 in the control group, and in the qualitative section, there is only the experimental group. In the study, the KA-SI Empathic Tendency Scale for Children and Adolescents developed by Kaya and Siyez (2010), the Attitudes Towards Disabled Children Scale developed by Gümüş and Öncel (2019) adapted into Turkish, the Self-Compassion Scale and the semi-structured Self-Compassion Scale, whose validity and reliability were tested by Erişen et al. (2021) An interview form was used. After the pre-tests, UHEP was applied to the experimental group. Two weeks after the final tests were taken, retention tests were applied only to the experimental group students. Mann Whitney U, Friedman test and Wilcoxon Signed Rank test were used in the quantitative data analysis of the study, and content analysis was used in the qualitative data analysis. As a result, a significant difference was found in favor of the experimental group in the emotional and cognitive empathy, interaction and acceptance, avoidance, pity, closeness, self-kindness, self-judgment, isolation and over-identification sub-dimensions of UHEP secondary school students. In the permanence tests, it was determined that there was no significant difference in emotional empathy, compassion, awareness of sharing and consciousness scores. As a result, it was observed that the 6-week UHEP improved the empathy, attitude and self-compassion of secondary school students towards the disabled, and did not affect the emotional empathy, compassion, awareness of sharing and consciousness levels, but it did affect all other sub-dimensions.