The Effectiveness of Education Based on Acceptance and Commitment based on Quality of Family Relationships and Feeling of Failure in Adolescent Girls with High-Risk Behaviors

Background & Objective:

 High-risk behaviors are among the most serious health threats, which have been considered by health organizations, law enforcement, and social policymakers as one of the most important problems in society in recent years due to rapid social changes. High-risk behaviors are behaviors that increase the likelihood of negative, damaging physical, cognitive, and social outcomes for the individual. This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of education based on acceptance and commitment on the quality of family relationships and feelings of failure in adolescent girls with high-risk behaviors.

The present experimental study has a pretest-posttest design with a control group. The statistical population of this study included all the secondary female school adolescents of Babolsar City, Iran, in the academic year of 2017-2018. The sample consisted of 36 adolescent girls selected by purposeful sampling from those who were eligible. They were randomly assigned to experimental (n=18) and control (n=18) groups. The experimental group underwent the effectiveness of Education based on acceptance and commitment during 8 sessions, two 45-minute sessions per week. The inclusion criteria are as follows: having high-risk behaviors; lacking a history of psychosis, personality disorder and psychiatric disorders with psychotic symptoms, alcohol abuse, psychotropic drugs, and drug use; being a teenage girl and having a great interest in attending therapy sessions. The exclusion criterion was absence for more than 2 training sessions. Data were collected using the Iranian adolescent high-risk behaviors questionnaire (Zadeh-Mohammadi and Ahmad Abadi, 2008), the Family Assessment Device (Epstein NB et al. 1983), and the Failure to Feelings Questionnaire (Gilbert P et al.,1998). The experimental group underwent the effectiveness of acceptance and commitment training during 8 sessions, two 45-minute sessions per week. Data were analyzed using SPSS-25 software and multivariate analysis of covariance. Acceptance and commitment training is one of the third-wave therapies. It addresses six important concepts that have been confirmed: acceptance, defusion, the now, self, values, and committed action. The treatment was conducted in 5 one and a half hour sessions held twice a week in groups of students.

The results showed that the effectiveness of education based on acceptance and commitment had reduced the feeling of frustration (p>0.001) and increased the quality of family relationships among high-risk adolescents (p>0.001).

According to the results of this study, it can be concluded that acceptance and commitment training increases the quality of family relationships and decreases the failure feelings of female adolescents with high-risk behaviors.