The Relationship between Empathy and Self-Acceptance of College Students and Adaptation to College Life

Purpose: The successful adaptation of students to college life is an important factor that significantly influ-ences success or failure in life after college as well and it also correlates with the success or failure of important periods of life. Therefore, although many researchers have studied adaptation to college, so far studies have mainly focused on academic adaptation. However, as adaptation to college life includes not only academics but also various factors such as interpersonal relationships and emotional adaptation, it is also important to shed light on the relationship between variables other than academics and college life adaptation. This study aims to reveal important information that helps college students adapt to school by examining in detail how empathy and self-acceptance affect adaptation to college life. Method: Questionnaires about empathy, self-acceptance, and adaptation to college life were administered to 345 college students, and the analyses were performed based on the data of 318 students who answered faithfully. First, a correlation analysis was conducted to confirm the relationship between each variable, and a variance analysis was conducted to see if there were any differences in empathy, self-acceptance, and adaptation to college life according to school year and gender. Finally, in order to comprehensively confirm the relationship between the three variables, AMOS 22.0 was used to analyze the structural equations. Results: The results of the analysis indicated there was a significant correlation between empathy and self-acceptance and adaptation to college life. The results of examining whether there were any significant differ-ences among the three variables according to gender and school year, showed that, in the case of empathy, female students' empathy was higher than that of male students, and there was no difference in self-acceptance according to gender. In the case of adaptation to college life, male students showed higher rates. In terms of differences by school year, there was no difference in empathy and self-acceptance, and there was a significant difference in college life adaptation by school year. Post-hoc analysis(Scheffe method) was performed to confirm specific differences by school year, but no significant differences were found. Examining the relationship between empathy, self-acceptance, and adaptation to college life, empathy had a positive effect on adaptation to college life and self-acceptance. Self-acceptance also had a positive effect on adaptation to college life. Conclusion: This study is intended to specifically elucidate the effect of empathy and self-acceptance on ad-aptation to college life. It was found that empathy and self-acceptance had a positive effect on adaptation to college life as predicted in this study. Also, it was confirmed that self-acceptance had a mediating influence on the effect of empathy on adaptation to college life. The results will be used as important data for various activities to improve adaptation to college life. This suggests that improving empathy and self-acceptance abilities should be included as an important factor in the process of developing a future program for college life adaptation.