The Mediating Effect of Empathy in the Relationship Between Emotional Safety Education and Disaster Prevention for Manufacturing Workers

This study aims to examine the mediating effect of empathy in the relationship between emotional safety education and accident prevention in industrial settings.Previous research has been insufficient in exploring the relationship between emotional safety education and accident prevention, particularly the role of empathy.Therefore, this study analyzes the relationship between emotional safety education, empathy, and accident prevention among construction and manufacturing workers and verifies the mediating effect of empathy to explore effective utilization strategies for emotional safety education.An online survey was conducted on manufacturing workers in the metropolitan area for 41 days from October 17 to November 27, 2024, and 324 copies were used.Random sampling, a nonprobability sampling method, was used.Collected data were analyzed through frequency analysis, reliability analysis, descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, and Sobel test using mediation regression analysis.The results showed that, first, there were positive correlations between emotional safety education and accident prevention, emotional safety education and empathy, and empathy and accident prevention.Second, empathy had a significant mediating effect on the relationship between emotional safety education and accident prevention.In other words, emotional safety education promotes empathy, which in turn has a positive effect on accident prevention.Although this study has limitations in generalization due to the use of a non-probability sampling method, it is significant in that it emphasizes the importance of emotional safety education and empirically verifies the accident prevention effect mediated by empathy.Future research should secure the representativeness of the sample and expand the study to various industrial fields to analyze the effects of emotional safety education in depth.