PA Peace Alliance Webinar Series: Empathy in Action – Building Trust through Interviews with Youth, Families, and Staff
Empathy interviews are a powerful way to build trust, deepen understanding, and elevate lived experience. In this session, we explored how to conduct empathy interviews with youth, families, and staff—and how to train them to become interviewers themselves. This participatory approach strengthens positive relationships between interviewer and interviewee, promotes perspective-taking, and offers actionable insights for programs and policies. Participants left with adaptable protocols, example questions, and ideas for embedding empathy interviews into everyday practice, youth leadership, and staff culture-building.
This webinar was led by WestEd's own Dr. Theresa Pfister. Her experience in K-12, non-profit, and higher education settings position her at the intersection of research and evaluation and technical assistance. Her work at WestEd spans qualitative research, school climate, social-emotional learning, trauma-informed schools, school-based mental health, and equity in education.
Theresa earned a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Pomona College, a Masters in teaching from Relay GSE, and a PhD in Educational Psychology-Applied Developmental Science from the University of Virginia’s School of Education and Human Development. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals including Applied Developmental Science and The Journal of Early Adolescence, as well as practitioner-facing magazines such as ASCD's Educational Leadership and UC Berkeley's Greater Good.