Background/Purpose Partnership is widely understood as an important characteristic in dance sport competitions. It is important that dance sport couples understand partner's emotions and thoughts, and establish empathy with them. The purpose of the study was to verify the mediation effect of the empathy in relationship between self-esteem and partnership in dance sport.
Method Participants were 150 dancers (58 male, 92 female) who actively involved in dance sport in Seoul metropolitan area in Korea. Their ages ranged from 17 to 60 years (M=31.3, SD=8.7). Participants were asked to complete three questionnaires: Self-esteem Questionnaire (Rosenberg, 1965), Empathy Scale (Jeon, 2003), and Partnership Scale (Kim, 2011). The statistical method used to test the mediation effect was a bootstrapping analysis, a non-parametric method for assessing indirect effects. Structural Equation Modeling was conducted using the AMOS software.
Analysis/Results The model appears to be a good fit to the data (CFI=.952, TLI=.927, RMSEA=.079). The empathy was predicted by self-esteem (b=.45, p=.001) and partnership was predicted by empathy (b=.49, p=.001) and self-esteem (b=.09, p=.407). Results from bootstrapping yielded an indirect effect of b=.217 (SE=.077) with a 95% confidence interval from 0.73 to 0.38. The empathy was a significant mediator between self-esteem and partnership in dance sport.
Conclusions The results showed dancer's empathy level influences the relationship between self-esteem and partnership.
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