Effectiveness of Native-Local Games on Social Development and Mental Health Subscales in 12-14-year-Old Female Students

The present study aimed to investigate the effect of native-local games on the female students’ social and psychological development aspects. This study was quasi-experimental with pre-test and post-test design and the control group. Two classes consisting of thirty-five students, aged 12-14 years, were selected via the purposive sampling method and then divided into two experimental (n = 18) and control (n = 17) groups. The native games team did their activities for 12 weeks, one and a half hour per a week. During this period, the control group subjects performed the usual school activities. Data were analyzed using the Mann-Whitney U test and Wilcoxon test. The results showed that in social development and most of its subscales, the native-local games group had a significant improvement over the usual school activities group. However, at the mental health scale, only in terms of the subscale of physical symptoms, there was a significant difference between the two groups. It can be concluded that native-local games can be an easy and indigenous way of improving some aspects of social development and sub-scales of mental health in students