The Effect of Psychodrama on Social Skills of School Children Suffering from Attention-Deficit/hyperactivity Disorder

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder is the most common behavioral disorder in children that results in social, educational, and familial ability problems. Psychodrama is one of the effective psychotherapy methods in curing some of psychological disorders. Therefore, the aim of this research is to study the effect of psychodrama on social skills of school children suffering from attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. This research is a semi-experimental research including a pretest-posttest instrument with a control group. The statistical population includes all school children suffering from attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder were referred to Tehran NezamMafi Rehabilitation Clinic in 2016; in 90 children who had the quality of participating in the research 40 children were selected to be available and were placed accidentally and simply into two equal 20-population experiment and control groups. The Social Skill Rating System (SSRS) by Gresham & Elliot (1990) was used to investigate the children’s social skills. After the pretest, the experiment group participated in 12 sessions of psychodrama lasting 40-60 minutes and the control group received routine interventions. After conducting the experiment, the social skills of the two experiment and control group were investigated and the data was analyzed through descriptive statistical calculations and differential T-test by SPSS v.22 software. The comparison of the scores between two experimental and control groups of the children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder showed that the average of the scores in experimental group was 35.72 with standard deviation 19.4 )P = 0.001) that was more than the average of the control group 29.63 with standard deviation of 30.2 (P = 0.069), and it showed that the experiment group in comparison with the control group had a meaningful increase in social skills and their subdivisions (P < 01.0, t = 71.5). The findings demonstrates that psychodrama increases social skills of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, so it can be used as a therapeutically method in teaching social skills to these children.