The Effects of Social Problem-Solving Skills Training on Psychological Status in Juvenile Delinquents

Adolescence is associated with a series of rapid biopsychosocial changes. These alternations generate a significant level of anxiety in teenagers. Adolescents are highly influenced by socioeconomic, gender–wise, and cultural factors. This is because of being in a critical period of growth. Research evidence suggests that adolescent offenders lack life skills. A skill required for life is social problem–solving. The innovative point of this study is that few intervention trials have been conducted in the juvenile delinquency population; however, changing the behavior of delinquent juveniles is essential for the community’s health and onechr('39')s mental health. The current study aimed to determine the effect of social problem–solving skills training on the psychological status of juvenile delinquents.

This was a quasi–experimental study with a pretest–posttest and a control group design. The statistical population of this study was all juvenile delinquents of the Correctional Center in Tehran City, Iran. Through the convenience sampling method, 50 individuals were selected to participate in the study. Then, they were randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups. The criterion for the selection of sample size was 0.25 effect size, as well as alpha 0.05 and 0.80 in the study groups. The minimum sample size was considered as 25 per group. The experimental group received social problem–solving skills training. The control group received no training. Both study groups were evaluated in two stages of pretest and posttest in terms of personality characteristics and subjective wellbeing. The inclusion criteria of the study were as follows: an age range of 13–18 years, living in the correctional center for committing delinquent behaviors and receiving no other training or psychological interventions. The exclusion criterion was absences from >3 sessions. The ethical considerations of the present study were as follows: all individuals received information about the research orally and participated in the research voluntarily; we also ensured that all obtained data remains confidential and used for research purposes. The experimental group underwent 13 one–hour weekly sessions of social problem–solving training. The content of the sessions was based on the social problem–solving model of D’Zurilla and Nezu (1980). The Big Five Inventory (John, 1990) and the Subjective Wellbeing Scale (Keyes et al., 2002) were used to collect the required information. The collected data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, such as mean and standard deviation, and inferential statistics, like Multivariate Analysis of Covariance (MANCOVA) in SPSS at the significance level of 0.05.

The present research results indicated that the mean posttest score of extraversion personality was higher in the experimental group, compared to the controls (F=9.21, p<0.004). However, there was no significant difference between the experimental and control groups in the pretest–posttest scores of neuroticism (F=1.82, p=0.185), positive affect (F=1.25, p=0.263), negative affect (F=0.17, p=0.671), life satisfaction (F=3.87, p=0.051), and subjective wellbeing (F=1.35, p=0.256).

It can be concluded that social problem–solving skills training affects the extraversion personality traits of delinquent male adolescents; thus, the center of correction can improve extraversion personality traits through social problem–solving training for adolescents.