The Relationship Between Empathy and Civic-Mindedness in First-Year Engineering Students

This Research Full Paper explores the relationship between civic-mindedness and empathy, both of which are instrumental to helping engineers meaningfully engage with community members and their needs. This study addresses the research question: “What aspects of civic-mindedness are significant predictors of empathy in first-year engineering students?” We administered a survey to first-year engineering students in Fall 2019 that included the Civic-Minded Graduate Scale (as a measure of civic-mindedness) and the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (as a measure of empathic concern and perspective taking). We administered the survey once at the start of the course and again at the end of the course to measure changes in civic-mindedness and empathy across the semester. We used 366 complete survey responses to generate regression models predicting students' empathic concern and perspective taking tendencies based on five civic-mindedness factors. Results indicated that, when adjusting for students' civic-mindedness at the start of the semester, select aspects of civic-mindedness inform students' general empathic tendencies. These findings suggest that teaching civic-mindedness to engineering students can also enhance their empathic skills and dispositions.