Effectiveness of Story-Telling on Affective Perspective Taking and Social Problem Solving among Elementary School Girl Students

Having the necessary skills to deal with problems and challenges is one of the essential needs that should be taught to children early. This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of storytelling on affective perspective-taking and social problem-solving among elementary school Girl students. This study was a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest with the control group.

This research was a semi-experimental design with two experimental and control groups, and the statistical population was all female students of the sixth grade of elementary school in Tehran, 30 of whom were selected from girls' elementary schools in Tehran using available sampling methods from Region 5. They were randomly divided into two groups experimental (15 people) and control (15 people). The measurement tool of this research was the Affective Perspective Taking  Questionnaire (APT) by Mohammadi and Amiri (2015) and the Revised Social Problem Solving Questionnaire (SPSI-R) by Dzorilla et al. (2002). The experimental group was trained in storytelling during 8 sessions of 50 minutes.

Univariate and multivariate covariance analysis tests were used to analyze the data. The results showed that storytelling has a significant effect on Affective perspective-taking and all subscales of Social problem-solving except the Impulsive/Reckless Style (P<0.05).

Story-telling is Effective in Improving Emotional Perspective-taking and Solving Social Problems of Female Students. Therefore, if teaching these skills at the elementary school level is done through story-telling, in addition to improving the students' relationship with each other, it will lead to a more appropriate handling of challenges and issues