The effectiveness of group cognitive-behavioral intervention on reduction of dysfunctional attitudes, hopelessness and suicidal ideation amongst young prisoners

This research is carried out with the aim of considering the effectiveness of group cognitive-behavioral intervention on reduction of inefficient attitudes, hopelessness and suicidal ideation amongst young prisoners. This research has benefited from testing method with pre-test, post-test and control group. The male prisoners from 18-30 years of age in the prison of Qouchan city have participated. Those with high scores on questionnaires have been randomly placed in test group (n=20) and in control group (n=20). Group intervention was performed during 12 sessions. Tools include a demographic questionnaire, Dysfunctional Attitude Scale (DAS) and the Beck Hopelessness Scale (BHS) and Beck Scale for Suicidal Ideation (BSSI). For data analysis, variance analysis is done by repeated measuring and in order to compare the averages of three variables in the test group, the LSD test was used in triple times (pretest, posttest and follow-up test). The interactive effect of time-of-test factor and the group are separately meaningful for each dependent variable. Also, the effect of group and the time of test are separately meaningful for each dependent variable. So we can say that group cognitive-behavioral intervention is effective on reduction of the amount of dysfunctional attitudes, hopelessness and suicidal ideation. The mean difference between pretest and posttest were meaningful in measuring each one of the three dependent variables. On the other hand the difference between the average of posttest and follow-up test were not meaningful in any of the dependent variables, but the mean difference between pretest and follow-up test were meaningful in each variable. The results of the research based on the effectiveness of group cognitive-behavioral intervention were in harmony with many researches. They show the stability of the intervention effect on the amount of dependent variables. They also indicate that group cognitive-behavioral intervention is effective on dysfunctional attitudes, hopelessness and young prisoners.