Social Support, Empathy and Academic Engagement: A Mediational Study

Academic engagement is a crucial construct in educational psychology. Academic engagement depends on a range of aspects that are associated to student characteristics, teacher, teaching methods, peers, and school features. This research aimed to examine the role of social support in predicting academic engagement mediated by empathy in high school students. We used a descriptive correlation design and examined the proposed model via structural equation modeling. The studied population included all female high school students of Baharestan, Tehran (Iran) in 2022. Participants were 320 people were selected by accessible sampling method. We used the Vaux social support appraisals (SS-A) scale, Fredricks school engagement and Adolescent Measure of Empathy and Sympathy (AMES) to collect data. Our results indicated that social support has a direct and positive effect on empathy (P< .01, β= .556) and empathy has a direct positive effect on students' academic engagement as well (P< .01, β= .329). Furthermore, social support affects students' academic engagement both directly (P < .01, β = .486) and through empathy (P < .01, β = .183). Overall, the results of this study exhibited that empathy can play a mediating role in the relationship between social support and students' academic engagement. The results point to the importance of considering emotional and social factors as predictors of academic engagement in high school students.