The Effect of Group Therapy based on Acceptance and Commitment on Social and Emotional Adjustment of Nursing Students

Students, especially nursing students, have many problems in terms of social and emotional adjustment. Therefore, the present research aimed at determining the effect of group therapy based on acceptance and commitment on social and emotional adjustment of nursing students.
This research was a semi-experimental with a pre-test and post-test with experimental and control groups. The research population included all nursing students of Islamic Azad University of Pishva branch, during academic years 2015 and 2016. From this group, 40 individuals were selected by available sampling method and randomly assigned to 2 equal groups. The experimental group was trained by the approach of group therapy based on acceptance and commitment during 8 sessions of 90 minutes. Both groups completed dimensions of social and emotional adjustment of Bell’s adjustment questionnaire. Data were analyzed using the SPSS-17 software and by multivariate analysis of covariance method.
The findings showed that there was a significant difference between experimental and control groups in the variables of social and emotional adjustment. In other words, group therapy based on acceptance and commitment significantly led to improvement in social and emotional adjustment of nursing students (P ≤ 0.05).
The results are due to the effect of group therapy based on acceptance and commitment method indicating increased social and emotional adjustment of nursing students. Therefore, it is suggest for counselors and therapists to use group therapy based on acceptance and commitment method to improve dimensions of adjustment-specific social and emotional adjustment.