The Effectiveness of Teaching the Concept of Afterlife through Group Discussion on the Religious Commitment of Teenagers

Believing in the afterlife is the second major principle which people are invited to, after theism, in all divine religions especially in Islam. This belief has an important role in religious commitment. Teaching of believing in the afterlife in the adolescence, which is an era of flourishing of wisdom and religion and the era of outburst of instincts, is more important. The present study aims to investigate the effectiveness of teaching the concept of afterlife through group discussion on religious commitment of teenagers. To this end, after designing an educational package, 40 eleventh-grade high schooler boys from Qazvin were selected through cluster random sampling. After designing an experiment and a control group, pre-tests were applied on both groups. Then, the educational package of afterlife belief was administered among the experiment group through group discussion. And then the post-tests were applied. Study design was for two dependent series and data were analyzed using Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Mann-Whitnet U tests .Results showed that teaching the concept of afterlife was effective on religious commitment and decreased religious non-commitment and ambivalence among teenagers.