Empathy and Moral Identity as Predictors of Peer Support Volunteerism for Preventing Farmer Suicide in Punjab | The International Journal of Indian Psychȯlogy

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PEER-REVIEWED

Comparative Study

| Published: May 14, 2019

Empathy and Moral Identity as Predictors of Peer Support Volunteerism for Preventing Farmer Suicide in Punjab

Head & Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, Punjabi University, Patiala, Punjab, India. Google Scholar More about the auther

Amandeep Singh ,

Senior Research Fellow, Department of Psychology, Punjabi University, Patiala, Punjab, India. Google Scholar More about the auther

Sandeep Kaur

Junior Research Fellow, Department of Psychology, Punjabi University, Patiala, Punjab, India. Google Scholar More about the auther

DIP: 18.01.048/20190702

DOI: 10.25215/0702.048

ABSTRACT

The main focus of the present study was to see the relative contribution of empathy and moral identity in peer support volunteerism for preventing suicide among farmers of Punjab. The sample comprised of 30 students from Punjab who agreed for becoming a peer support volunteer in the prevention of farmers’ suicide in Punjab and 33 students who declined the same. For this purpose, the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (Spreng, Margaret, McKinnon, Raymond, & Levine, 2009) and Moral Identity Scale (Aquino & Reed, 2002) were administered. Binary logistic regression was run to examine to what extent it is possible to predict volunteerism from empathy and moral identity. Results showed that empathy and moral identity internalisation were found to be significant predictors of peer support volunteerism while moral identity symbolisation was found to be a non-significant predictor of peer support volunteerism. The current findings suggest that enhancing empathy and moral identity can help individuals to be involved in prosocial acts and volunteerism.

Keywords

Peer Support Volunteerism, Suicide, Empathy, Moral Identity, Moral Identity Symbolisation, Moral Identity Internalisation

This is an Open Access Research distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any Medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

How to cite this article:

Kaur, H, Singh, A & Kaur, S (2019). Empathy and Moral Identity as Predictors of Peer Support Volunteerism for Preventing Farmer Suicide in Punjab. International Journal of Indian Psychology, 7(2), 396-404. DIP:18.01.048/20190702, DOI:10.25215/0702.048