Middle Eastern Journal of Disability Studies

Abstract
Background & Objectives: The relationship between the adolescent and her/his family members is considered one of the most important factors influencing the socialization of adolescents. The quality of the parent-child relationship often requires a renegotiation of roles and relationships related to everyday issues such as friends, activities, responsibilities, and entering schools and universities. Adolescence is one of the essential age periods that plays an essential role in the growth and evolution of outstanding psychological characteristics such as self-efficacy, resilience, optimism, and hope. These critical components and variables in contemporary psychology have been mentioned in the form of psychological capital. Considering the importance of parent-child relationships and psychological capital, various educational strategies have been used in recent years to strengthen these characteristics, among which positive psychology education can be mentioned. This study aimed to determine the effectiveness of positive psychology training on the quality of parent-child relationships and psychological capital of senior high school girls.
Methods: This study method was quasi-experimental and was conducted with a pretest-posttest design and a control group. The statistical population of this research included all the senior high school girls of Golbahar City, Iran. Among the statistical population, 30 qualified volunteers were recruited using available sampling and randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups (each group includes 15 people). The inclusion criteria to the research included being in the age range of 12 to 18 years, living with their parents, not failing academically for two years in a row, having a GPA above 12, being able to communicate with other members of the group, being interested in participation in research, and the ability to coordinate the class schedule with the meeting schedule. The exclusion criteria were absenteeism of more than three sessions and non-observance of group therapy rules. Both groups completed in the pretest and posttest the Parent-Child Relationship Scale (Fine et al., 1983) and the Psychological Capital Questionnaire (Luthans et al., 2007). The positive psychology training program was implemented in the experimental group during nine 90–minute sessions and every session once a week. Still, the control group did not receive any treatment plan. Data analysis was carried out in two parts: descriptive statistics and inferential statistics. At the level of descriptive statistics frequency, mean, and standard deviation and at the level of inferential statistics, analysis of covariance was used. Data analysis was done in SPSS software version 27, and the significance level of the tests was considered to be 0.05.
Results: The results showed a significant difference in the variables of the parent-child relationship (positive emotions, hate and loss of role, identity, and communication) (p<0.001) and psychological capital (self-efficacy, hope, resilience, and optimism) (p<0.001) between the experimental and control groups in the posttest, after removing the effect of the pretest. Also, positive psychology training could increase positive emotions by 90%, identity by 92%, communication by 88%, but decrease hate and loss of role by 26%. Also, positive psychology training increased the self-efficacy by 96%, hope by 95%, resilience by 87%, and optimism by 85%.
Conclusion: This research showed that positive psychology training for adolescent girls is suitable for improving the parent-child relationship and increasing the psychological capital.