Objectives

Empathy conception brings people closer and facilitates communication in almost all areas of daily life. Empathy are an important dimension of foster care and these skills should be developed in foster family. In this study, we aimed to determine the empathic level of foster family.

Methods:

This cross-sectional study on foster families was performed in Turkey. Data were collected with 124 fosters parents. In the study, two instruments were used: personal knowledge form,

and Basic Empathy Scale. The volunteers were chosen through “snowball” method from nonprobability sampling methods. The data were analyzed by using SPSS version 18.0 of descriptive statistics.

Results:

The foster parents with a mean age of 48.37±9.36. Most of foster carers (89.5%) are married. Seventy six-six percent of foster families have their own biological child. For the ones having biological child 29.5% have one child, 41.9% have two and 12.1% have three children. Seventy six-six of foster families prefer female, 23.4% of them prefer male child. Fourty two-seven percent of the children placed are under 3 years of age, 31.5% of them are between 4-6 years of age and 25.8% of them are above 7 years of age.  Foster family that 76.6% of them give the social responsibility, 71.0% of them to protection, 58.1% of them to ownage and 45.2% of them to charity is defined. The ratio of the ones who think that to be a foster carer matures a person is 62.9%, the ratio of the ones who point out that they become role model for their environment is 77.4%.

The subjects have been asked to empathise with biological family and 59.7% have given first priority to “I want to be sure about my child’s safety”, 29.8% gave first priority to “I want to be sure that my child is in good hands”, 7.3% gave priority to “I want to see that my child is valued”. Also 56.5% of foster families have pointed out that they are disturbed by the idea that one they the child may be sent to his/her biological family.

General Cronbach’s alpha co-efficient of the instrument was found to be .76.  The cognitive empathy from sub-factors  was found .78 and the emotionel empathy from sub-factors was .62. Basic Empathy Scale average points were 71.52±9.76 in the parents. The cognitive empathy of mean was 34.49±5.79, the emotional empathy of mean was 37.03±6.08. The results showed that a significant difference didn’t existed between females’ and males’ emotional empathy, cognitive empathy subbdimensions and their total empathy scores (p>.05).

Conclusions:

Empathy scores of empathy were shown to be above average in both foster care parents. The empathic skills of parents have an impact an the development of children’s empathic skills. Such foster child tend to help people in difficult situations.

Key words: Foster family, Foster children, Empathy