The Effectiveness of a Forgiveness Training Program on the Academic Hope of Students Who Have Been Victims of Bullying

The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of a forgiveness training program on the academic hope of students who have been victims of bullying. This study was an applied and semi-experimental study with pretest/posttest and a control group with one-month follow-up. A sample of 32 male students who were victims of bullying was selected from the high school students of Tabriz in the academic year 2019-2020 using the one-stage cluster sampling method and randomly divided into two groups of 16. The experimental group received ten sessions of the forgiveness training. After the training, the posttest results were obtained and analyzed using multivariate covariance. Research instruments included the Bullying Victims Scale (BVS), Academic Hope Scale (AHS), and the Forgiveness Training Package. Data were analyzed using multivariate analysis of covariance in SPSS20 software. The results showed that forgiveness training has a positive and significant effect on the components of academic hope in students who are victims of bullying, P <0.01. Based on the results, it can be said that forgiveness training can be a useful coping strategy for bullying victims so that they can use forgiveness to overcome the trauma of past experiences or traumatic events and improve their hope by creating positive emotions. In practice, forgiveness training can be used by educators as a potentially effective approach to improve school hope and prevent victimization.