Feasibility of systematic family therapy introduced into the school situations

Wenquan LI; Hui LI; Xudong ZHAO

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND:

Systematic family therapy focuses on the interaction,and group counseling contributes to the improving of interpersonal relationship. To introduce the ideas and techniques of systematic family therapy into school situations, which is necessary to the peer relationship improvement of disliked children in the class.

OBJECTIVE:

To study the feasibility of introducing the ideas and techniques of systematic family therapy into school situations with the aim of improving the peer relationship.

DESIGN:

Inequality experiment group and control group design.

SETTING:

Institute of Educational Sciences and Administration, Yunnan Normal University.

PARTICIPANTS:

The experiment was carried out in Kunming No.l Primary School from September 2000 to April 2001. Two out of three ordinary classes in Grade Six were chosen to take part in the experiment at the school. Both classes were similar in performance, total number and composing. Class 3 of Grade 6 (n=46) was made experiment class randomly,and Class 1 of Grade 6 (n=41) was comparison class. Children of both classes were measured by the Social Distance Scale for Children at the same time, which was described in 5 grades. All children were required to evaluate their classmates by the list. The following 5 grades respectively scored 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1 point making best friend with him or her willingly,hope to be with him or her in the same class but not the best friend, being with him or her willingly but not many times or too long, he or her may be in our class but have no intercourse, hope him or her not to be in our class. The evaluation result was statistically analyzed, and the higher the mean score of child had, the more popular he was. Five male children who was the farthest from their peers in the experiment class were taken as the experiment group according to the score of Social Distance Scale for Children, who were 12-13 years old with a mean age of 12.7 years. Another 5male children in the other class were selected as the control group by the same way, who were 12-13 years old with a mean age of 12.5 years.

METHODS:

The idea of systematic family therapy was introduced into the experiment group, including 10 times of group counseling, which were carried out by games, role-playing, group discussion, brain-storming etc.The "everyday work" was assigned to the class as the techniques of systematic family therapy required, especially for children in the experiment group such as "keep secret progress account", and teachers and classmates were required to watch and note their members' progress secretly.While children in the control group and corresponding class were given no intervention measure. Children of both classes were tested by the Social Distance Scale for Children to evaluate the changes in peer relationship during and after the experiment respectively. And children in the experiment group were required to fill in the Group Activity Viewpoint Questionnaire.MAIN OUTCOME

MEASURES:

Comparison in score of Social Distance Scale for Children before, during and after the intervention, and the investigation on viewpoint about group activity in the experiment group.

RESULTS:

A total of 10 children in both groups were involved in the analysis of results. There was no significant difference between children of the two groups in social distance before intervention and during it(t=0.232,1.089, P ＞ 0.05). It cotld be Iearnt from the experiment after test that the score in children of the experiment group was remarkably higher than that of the control group (t=3.169, P ＜ 0.05). The effect of group activity on children in the experiment group was remarkably clear and excellent.

CONCLUSION:

It is effect and feasible to introduce the idea and techniques of systematic family therapy into school situations, aiming at improving the peer relationship of children.