The eeffectiveness of psychological treatments on oppositional defiant disorder in Iran: meta-analysis

Childhood is the most important stage of development of every human being. One of the most common childhood disorders is oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), so the aim of this study was to review and meta-analyze the effectiveness of psychological therapies (including improving parenting styles, life skills training and Social, play and story therapy) on this disorder.

This meta-analysis was carried out on articles published from 2005 to 2020 in the databases of SID, Magiran, Noormags and the Comprehensive Portal of Humanities. Search on scientific databases was done with keywords related to the research topic and 74 scientific research articles with clinical trials were extracted. After removing duplicates and reviewing the quality of articles according to the Consort checklist by three psychologists and statisticians, 5 articles had necessary conditions to participate in meta -analysis. By using Random model, articles meta-analyzed at a significance level of 0.05 using 5.4 Review Manager Software.

Results of meta-analysis and comparing the mean difference of the scores of ODD between the intervention and control groups showed significant higher reduction of symptoms in the intervention group compared to control group in all studies. The mean difference of standardized score for all studies was 2.88 (2.36-3.40; P <0.001) that indicated the effect of psychological interventions.

This study showed that psychological therapies (including improving parenting styles, life and social skills training, play and story therapy) are effective in reducing the symptoms of oppositional defiant disorder. Therefore, psychological therapies is useful to treat ODD