Determining the Effectiveness of Psychological Hardiness Training on Quality of Life and General Anxiety of Female Junior High School Students

Generalized anxiety disorder is one of the most common psychiatric disorders defined as extreme anxiety and uncontrollable mental anxiety about various issues that lasts for at least six months, so it is difficult to control them. Symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder include restlessness, irritability, muscle contraction, fatigue, sleep disturbances, and difficulty concentrating. One of the therapies is psychological toughness training, which has gained a valuable position among psychologists. Psychological toughness is a set of personality traits that acts as a source of resistance and a protective shield in the face of stressful life events and includes the three components of commitment, control, and struggle. Many studies have shown the importance of psychological toughness as a protective personality trait against life stresses. Still, the field of psychological toughness training has not been studied much, and doing psychological toughness training is one of the innovative aspects of the present study. Therefore, considering the importance of providing mental health to students with generalized anxiety disorder as a socially active element and improving their quality of life, providing a treatment plan that increases their stubborn personality traits and reciprocally their quality of life is very important and necessary. On the other hand, no research has been conducted in this field in the target community at the national level. Therefore, this study aimed to determine the effectiveness of psychological hardiness training on female high school students’ quality of life and general anxiety.

This quasi–experimental research has a pretest–posttest design with a control group. The study population included all female high school students in Sarayan City, Iran, in the academic year 2019–2020. The inclusion criteria were as follows: having pervasive anxiety, the gender of the girl, being in the first secondary school, and not receiving other medical and psychological treatments. Also, the exclusion criteria included the presence of organic, mental, or psychotic disorders based on school health records, not regularly participating in classes, and not completing questionnaires. Thirty eligible students with generalized anxiety disorder were selected by convenience sampling and randomly assigned to the experimental group (n=15) and the control group (n=15). The experimental group was trained in Madi's (2008) psychological hardiness training for 8 sessions per week, but the control group did not receive any training. To collect information, the World Health Organization (WHO) Quality of Life Questionnaire (2000) and Spitzer et al. (1992) Comprehensive Anxiety Inventory were completed by all subjects in the pretest and posttest. Data were analyzed using SPSS software version 24 and multivariate analysis of covariance at the significance level of α=0.05.

The findings showed that after adjusting the pretest scores on the posttest scores, the experimental group's mean quality of life scores compared to the control group increased significantly (p<0.001). Also, the mean scores of generalized anxieties decreased significantly (p<0.001).

According to the study findings, psychological hardiness training effectively increased the quality of life and reduced general anxiety in students; therefore, psychological hardiness training should be provided as a complementary treatment along with life skills in the form of workshops for normal students.