Islamic Counseling for Character Building: Measuring Its Effectiveness on Students' Empathy Levels

Abstract

Empathy is a core social-emotional competency for adolescent development, yet many junior high school students display only moderate levels of empathy, pointing to a need for interventions grounded in students' cultural and religious context. This study examined the effectiveness of Islamic counseling in enhancing students' self-empathy at Al-Hasanah Islamic Junior High School. A quantitative, quasi-experimental one-group pretest-posttest design was employed. From a screening cohort of Class VIII.1 students, the five students with the lowest empathy scores were purposively selected and received individual counseling grounded in Islamic values. Self-empathy was measured using a four-indicator Likert-scale questionnaire whose validity and reliability had previously been established (Cronbach's alpha = .904). Data were analyzed descriptively, tested for normality using the Shapiro-Wilk test, and examined for significance using the Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test. Results showed that students' mean empathy score increased from 89.20 at pretest to 115.20 at posttest, with all five students improving and no negative ranks recorded; the Wilcoxon test confirmed this increase was statistically significant (Z = -2.023, p = .043). These findings indicate that individual Islamic counseling effectively strengthens junior high school students' self-empathy and suggest that guidance and counseling teachers in Islamic schools can adopt values-based individual counseling as a practical, personalized approach to supporting students' social-emotional development, pending confirmation from larger, controlled studies.