Interpersonal and Intercultural Empathy in Military-Associated Overseas Students

Abstract

A powerful concept in global leadership development is intercultural empathy. Bennett (1986) portrays intercultural empathy as the” readiness to give up temporarily one’s own worldview in order to imaginatively participate in that of another person” (p. 3). Opportunities to participate in the other culture are thus at the core of intercultural empathic development. For over sixty years, children of active duty military and civilian personnel overseas have been attending schools overseas. The overseas experience offers these children the opportunity to expand their worldview and become global citizens. While students in overseas situations--international schools, exchange programs, and study abroad programs--have been measured in terms of their intercultural empathy, students associated with military schools overseas have not been so measured. In this research, 144 military-associated students overseas were surveyed. Number of years spent overseas and involvement in the host culture was measured against an intercultural empathy instrument--the Miville-Guzman Universality-Diversity Scale (Miville, 1999) and an interpersonal empathy instrument--the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (Davis, 1983). Results showed a significant relationship between the overseas experience and intercultural but not interpersonal empathy.