The effect of social skills training on self-esteem of adolescents with intellectual disability

Self-esteem play essential roles in all of life aspects of peoples, particularly adolescents with intellectual disablity. Therefore, emphasized on instruction of programs that led to improvement of self-esteem. This study was aimed to investigate of the effctiveness of social skills training on self-esteem of adolescents with intellectual disability in Mazandaran province. In this semi-experimental study with pretest and posttest design with control group, were selected fourty girls adolescents with intellectual disablity of 14-18 years old through multi–stage cluster sampling method. Subjects allocated randomly into two groups (experimental and control) and each group consist of 20 individuals. Experimental group attended in social skills training in the 8 sessions lasting for 90 minutes, but control group did not. All the participants were assessed through Cooper Smith’s self-esteem questionare. The obtained data were statistically analyzed by MANCOVA using SPSS software (version 16, SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL). The results of MANCOVA for subscales of self-esteem showed that experimental and control group had significant difference, At least in one of the subscales of the self-esteem of self, social, familly or academic (P= 0/0027). The final results of MANCOVA showed that social skills training had significant and positive effect on the self-esteem of self (P= 0/0033), self-esteem of social (P= 0/0041), self-esteem of familly (P= 0/0039) and self-esteem of academic (P= 0/0026). Social skills training program led to improvement of the self-esteem and their subscules on adolescents with intellectual disability. So planning for Social skills training is of particular importance for adolescents with intellectual disability.