A comparative study of the effectiveness of the solution-focused brief therapy and mindfulness-based therapy to reduce educational stress in junior high school students in Tehran

Educational stress is a negative psychological condition; with its cognitive and emotional components, threatens students' health.

This study aimed to compare the effectiveness of the solution-focused brief therapy and mindfulness-based therapy to reduce educational stress in junior high school students.

Through the framework of a clinical trial plan with pre-test and post-test and quarterly post hoc test, this study was conducted. In a purposive sampling manner, sixty students; among the first year of junior high school male students in Tehran district 13thin the school year 2019-2020, were selected and then surveyed by Don, Hu and Zhou (2011) Adolescent Educational Stress Scale and were randomly divided into 3 groups of 20: control group, solution-focused treatment group and mindfulness treatment group. Then the intervention process was run on the experimental groups and after three months the follow-up test was rerun. The data were analyzed by using SPSS-26 and the covariance analysis and mixed-design analysis of variance tests.

This study brought light on the effectiveness of both treatments methods in reducing educational stress among students, but the mindfulness method (Eta2=0.357) worked better rather the brief solution-focused intervention method(Eta2=0.318) to reduce students' stress (P<0.05).

In regard to use mindfulness therapy primarily, therapists are highly recommended to use both the solution-focused brief intervention and mindfulness therapy to treat the adolescent students with educational stress.