Middle Eastern Journal of Disability Studies

Background & Objectives: Adolescence and youth are two critical periods of life. The essential physiological and psychological changes, on the one hand, and the environmental challenges (such as those imposed by the family or the society), on the other hand, cause severe stress during these critical periods. Many adolescents experience stress due to family conflicts, physical and emotional changes, and personal identity development. Resilience is one of the concepts that has been introduced in positive psychology and refers to successful adaptation to threats and challenges. Psychological training may include different counseling approaches, such as solution-focused brief therapy, FRIENDS program, and aerobic exercise. It is necessary to solve students' resilience problems by recognizing the factors affecting their resilience. This study compared the effectiveness of the FRIENDS program, solution-focused brief counseling, and aerobic exercise on students' resilience.
Methods: The research method was quasi-experimental with a pretest-posttest, three-month follow-up design, and a control group. The statistical population included all male adolescents aged 13-15 years studying in the first grade of Tehran Province, Iran, high school (Kahrizak education area) in the academic year 2019-20. The total number of students was 219. In this study, 60 students were selected as study subjects and randomly assigned to three experimental groups and one control group (each group with 15 members). The inclusion criteria included being 13 to 15 years old, having a severe mental disorder or incurable disease, and not being treated with other psychological interventions during the study. The exclusion criterion for the experimental groups was an absence of more than two sessions from the intervention. The experimental group 1 was trained (FRIENDS program) by the researcher for 10 sessions of 60 minutes each; the experimental group 2 received solution-focused brief counseling, and group 3 received aerobic exercise training for 45 minutes in 12 sessions. No intervention was applied to the control group. The study data were collected for all groups in the pretest, posttest, and follow-up using the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (Connor & Davidson, 2003). For data sorting, central and dispersion indicators such as mean and standard deviation, and for data analysis, repeated measures analysis of variance and Tukey and Bonferroni post hoc tests were used. The Chi-square test was used to compare the four groups in terms of gender, and an analysis of variance was used to compare age. The mentioned statistical analyzes were performed in SPSS software version 22. The significance level of the tests was considered 0.05.
Results: The results of the analysis of the variance of the resilience variable were significant for the effects of time (p<0.001), group (p<0.001), and time×group interaction (p<0.001). The groups of aerobic exercise (p<0.001), solution-focused counseling (p<0.001), and FRIENDS program (p=0.006) were significantly different from the control group in terms of resilience. There were significant differences between the two groups of aerobic exercise and solution-focused counseling (p=0.009) and also between the two groups of solution-focused counseling and the FRIENDS program (p<0.001) regarding resilience; however, there was no significant difference between the two groups of aerobic exercise and the FRIENDS program (p=0.167). Resilience scores in the three experimental groups in the posttest stage were higher than that in the pretest stage (p<0.001). However, in the groups of aerobic exercise (p=0.157), solution-focused counseling (p=0.196), and the FRIENDS program (p=0.237), no significant difference was observed between the two stages of posttest and follow-up, indicating the persistence of the effectiveness of all three interventions in the follow-up stage.
Conclusion: According to the research findings, interventions of solution-focused brief counseling, FRIENDS psychological training, and aerobic exercise effectively increase students' resilience. Nevertheless, solution-focused brief counseling is more effective on students' resilience than the other two interventions.