Longitudinal Review of Communication Skills and Empathic Tendency Levels among the Students of the Department of Sports Management

This study aims to review communication skills and empathic tendency levels of the students who studied at the department of sports management in a longitudinal manner. The study was designed in a longitudinal survey model of quantitative study methods. The study group consisted of 122 students (52 female students, 70 male students) who attended the first grade of Sarikamis Department of Sports Management, School of Physical Education and Sports, Kars Kafkas University in Turkey during the 2016-2017 academic year. To detect the differences, data collection tools were employed four times for the same students during the first grade of 2016-2017 academic year, the second grade of 2017-2018 academic year, the third grade of 2018-2019 academic year and the fourth grade of 2019-2020 academic year. As data collection tools, "The Communication Skills Scale" (CSS) developed by Korkut (1996) and Empathic Tendency Scale (ETS) developed by Dökmen (1988) were used. The data were analyzed by using the Bonferroni post-hoc comparison test, independent t-test, analysis of one-way variance (ANOVA) and Pearson correlation coefficients. The result found that both students' communication skills and emphatic tendency levels were high, their 3rd grade communication skill scores were higher in terms of grade/time variable, their emphatic skill scores were higher in the 3rd and 4th grades, their scores of communication skills and emphatic tendency did not differ in terms of age and gender variables and a positive correlation existed between communication skills and emphatic tendency at all levels.