Date

12-16-2025

Department

School of Education

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy in Education (PhD)

Chair

Alexandra M. Barnett

Keywords

empathy, empathy theory, higher education, transcendental phenomenology

Disciplines

Educational Leadership

Abstract

The purpose of this transcendental phenomenological study was to describe the lived experiences of showing empathy to students for college professors at a private evangelical Christian university in the southeastern region of the United States. The theory guiding this study was Hoffman’s empathy theory, which describes the concepts and ideologies of empathy and explains the factors influencing professors' empathy towards their students. The Central Research Question was: What are the lived experiences of college professors showing empathy to their students? The study employed a transcendental-phenomenological research approach to describe participants' lived experiences. The participants in the study were ten professors of bachelor’s, master’s, or doctoral students at the university. Three data collection methods were employed to gain an in-depth understanding of the participants’ experiences with the phenomenon under investigation. The three data techniques were interviews, journal writing, and a letter-writing activity. The data was analyzed according to Moustakas’s principles: identifying significant statements, creating meaning units, clustering themes, advancing textual and structural descriptions, and forming a composite description that captures the essence of the experiences. Analyses of the data revealed the defining influences of empathy in education. The study found that empathy involves understanding students and their experiences. The results also indicated that empathy involves listening to students and providing them with constructive feedback.

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