Middle Eastern Journal of Disability Studies

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Choob Foroush Zadeh A, Saied Manesh M, Rashidi M S. Effectiveness of narrative therapy group on the cognitive flexibility of headless adolescents girls in welfare centers of Mashhad. MEJDS 2018; 8 :76-76
URL: http://jdisabilstud.org/article-1-896-en.html

Background & Objective: Adolescents orphan and headless are more face with problems and behavioral-emotional disorders than normal people in society and because of living in a limited environment and separate from their parents and family, have lack necessary skills to live in society. One of these essential skills is having cognitive flexibility to understand the surrounding people and examine issues from a variety of points of view. In adolescence, the puberty crisis also exacerbates these problems, and the need for more attention to this group of people is felt. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of group therapy narration on cognitive flexibility of headless adolescent girls in welfare centers of Mashhad.
Methods: The present study was a semi-experimental design with the experimental group and control group. Evaluation was performed with pre-test, interventional and post-test. The statistical population consisted of all orphans and headless adolescents girls in welfare centers of Mashhad, among them were selected twenty people by available sampling method and randomly assigned into two experimental and control groups (each group was 10) and the experimental group received 8 sessions of 90-minutes of narrative therapy. To measure the cognitive flexibility variable, Dennis and Vander Wal's cognitive flexibility inventory (made in 2010) was used. Outside of Iran, the simultaneous validity of this questionnaire with Beck depression inventory (-0.39) and its convergent validity with the cognitive flexibility scale of Martin and Robin (0.75) and the reliability of Cronbach's method was (0.91). Also, in Iran, reported a total retest coefficient scale of (0.71) and Cronbach's alpha coefficients of the total scale of 0.91. Data were analyzed by SPSS-20 software at two levels of descriptive statistics and inferential statistics. Descriptive statistics indexes including frequency, mean and standard deviation, and inferential statistics indexes including covariance analysis method were significantly (p<0.05).
Results: In the experimental group, the mean of total cognitive flexibility score was 69.4 in the pre-test, which reached 93.8 in the post-test, but in the control group the mean for the pre-test was from 96.6 to 91 in the post-test. The mean scores of the component of alternatives to human behaviors in the experimental group increased from four in the pre-test to 11.7in the post-test, while in the control group it increased from 7.7 in the pre-test to 7.9 in the post-test. The mean of pre-test scores for the control component was 33 in the experimental group, which was 46.40 in the post-test. However, in the control group, the mean in pre-test was from 49.7 to 50.3 in post-test. In addition, the mean scores of the component of the alternatives in the experimental group increased from 33 in the pre-test to 46.40 in the post-test, but in the control group from 49.7 to 50.3 increased. Covariance analysis showed that the overall score of cognitive flexibility and subscales of alternatives to human behavior and control in post-test and in the experimental group were significantly increase than the control group (p=0.001). Never the less, there was no significant increase and difference in the sub-scale of the alternatives between the two groups (p=0.068).
Conclusion: According to the findings, group therapy narrative has been effective on the cognitive flexibility of headless adolescent’s girls in welfare centers of Mashhad. Therefore, the use of this treatment is effective and it is recommended for identifying problems and reconstructing the personal narratives of headless adolescence.