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The Effects Of A Poverty Simulation On Immediate And Sustained Participant Empathy, Doris Mann

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Capstones

Using the Attribution and the Experiential Learning Theory seated within Constructivism, this study examined the effect of the poverty simulation, Community Action Poverty Simulation (CAPS), on empathetic attitude toward those who experience poverty. 778 participants represented the fields of education, health care, and social work. Measures of immediate and sustained empathetic attitude were conducted using the Basic Empathy Scale (BES) (Jolliffe & Farrington, 2006). Findings indicate that there is immediate empathetic attitude change for the participants, but no sustained empathetic attitude change. Some of the variables considered included gender, race, age, income, voluntary/in-voluntary and others. This study supports the need …