The effectiveness of group education based on acceptance and commitment on cognitive fusion and social competence of bullying adolescents in boarding schools

The aim of the present study was to determine the effectiveness of group education based on the acceptance and commitment on the cognitive fusion and social competence of bullying adolescents in the boarding schools. It was applied research and in terms of method, it was an experimental one due to the random assignment of the participants in the experimental and control groups. The research population included all the students of two boarding schools in Neishābour city who had bullying characteristics in the 98-99 academic year. The sample of this study consisted of 30 students of two boarding schools in the first-grade high school of Neishābour who were randomly selected with no assignment. These students were divided into experimental (N=15) and control groups (N=15). Evaluation was done by Gilanders (2010)’s Cognitive Fusion Questionnaire, Parandin (2006)’s Social Competence Questionnaire and Illinois’s Bullying Scale (2001). Findings of this study showed that the level of significance corresponding to all three variables in the group index is less than 0.017, so with the information collected and considering the rejection of the null hypothesis, the main hypothesis of the study (i.e., acceptance and commitment-based education has a positive effect on the social competence and cognitive fusion of bullying adolescents) was confirmed with 0.95 confidence. Acceptance and commitment-based education have been effective in reducing the cognitive fusion and improving the social competence of the bullying adolescents. It is suggested that this research to be conducted on the other disorders as well as in the other cities in order to have higher generalizability and to identify cultural differences in such studies.