Randomised Controlled Trial of Online Empathy Focused Intercultural Communication Program for Turkish Local Society to Increase Their Social Acceptance Towards Refugees

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Authors

Arzu Çalışkan Sarı¹ , Özden Yalçınkaya Alkar²

1. Çankırı Karatekin Üniversitesi
2. Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt Üniversitesi

Conference / event

Karatekin University Psychology Department, January 2022 (Virtual)

Poster summary

The current study investigated the efectiveness of an online-based, empathy-focused intervention program that is developed for Turkish local society to increase their positive attitudes towards refugees. The sample of the four-week intervention program consisted of 52 participants that were randomly assigned to experimental (n=26) and control groups (n=26). Participants completed the Attitudes towards Syrians Scale in both groups before and after the intervention program. In the control group, no implementation was provided, only the individuals flled the pre-test and post-test questionnaires within the same periods as the experimental group. Participants in the experimental group also flled a sentence completion activity at the end of the program. The results of the study showed that Empathy Focused Intercultural Communication Program for Turkish Local Society showed a positive promissory approach for increasing positive attitudes towards Syrian refugees, increasing emphatic and altruistic approach. Lastly, these results, limitations, and suggestions for future research were discussed and the possible implications were shared.

Keywords

Intervention for prejiduce reduction, Attitudes towards Syrians, Empathy, Intercultural communication

Research areas

Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Humanities and Social Sciences, Ethnic and Cultural Studies

References

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Funding

No data provided

Supplemental files

No data provided

Additional information

Competing interests

None declared.

Data availability statement

The datasets generated during and / or analyzed during the current study are available via the provided link.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1SKL4DOizwC7hnLrUc8Xo35zsLUc1pZIs

Creative Commons license

Copyright © 2022 Çalışkan Sarı et al. This is an open access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.