Comparing the Effectiveness of Choice Theory Training and Exploration Philosophy on Responsibility and Self-efficacy of Working Children in Rasht City, Iran

It is very important to pay attention to children as potential assets of society. Working children are among the most at–risk groups because they are at greater psychological and physical risk than other groups and need more support. Considering that child labor is one of the most important social harms that reports about it are published every day, it is crucial to conduct research to find the main problems of these children, including improving self–efficacy and responsibility. Philosophy for children has clear cognitive goals. It forces the mind to act, and it does so through the challenges of principled thinking and structured interaction. On the other hand, according to the principles of choice theory, people can be helped to make better choices in order to experience pleasant feelings and efficient behavior. So, this study aimed to compare the effectiveness of choice theory training and exploratory philosophy on the responsibility and self–efficacy of working children.

The current research method was quasi–experimental with a pretest–posttest design and a control group. The statistical population of the present study includes all working children aged 12 to 14 years living in Rasht City, Iran in 2020–2021. The statistical population comprised 120 people. The statistical sample of the study was 30 children who were selected as qualified volunteers by the accessible sampling method. After confirming and signing the consent form to participate in the research, they were randomly assigned to 3 groups: the experimental group of choice theory (10 children), the experimental group of exploration philosophy (10 children), and the control group (10 children). The inclusion criteria were as follows: subject's consent to participate in the study, aged 12 to 14 years, and studying. The exclusion criteria were as follows: the subject's lack of consent to participate or continue to attend the study, lack of suitable physical or mental conditions to complete answering the questionnaires, and failure to complete the questionnaires in a way that has a negative effect on the results. All three groups responded to the Personal Responsibility Scale for Adolescents (Mergler and Shield, 2016) and General Self–Efficacy Scale (Schwarzer and Jerusalem, 1995) in the pretest and posttest stages. Implementation of selection theory training was in 8 sessions of 1.5 hours, one session per week. The implementation of the program of teaching exploration philosophy to children was in 10 sessions of 1.5 hours, one session per week. To analyze the data, in addition to the use of central tendency indices and dispersion indices as descriptive statistics, inferential statistics were used, including covariance analysis and the Bonferroni post hoc test at a significant level of 0.05 via SPSS software version 23.

The results showed that therapeutic interventions based on selection theory and exploration philosophy increased the self–efficacy (p<0.001) and responsibility (p<0.001) of the experimental groups compared to the control group. There was a significant difference between the effectiveness of treatment based on choice theory and the treatment of exploration philosophy on increasing the self–efficacy of child labor (p<0.001). However, no significant difference was observed between the effectiveness of the mentioned therapeutic interventions on increasing the responsibility of child labor (p=0.686).

According to the research findings, the selection theory method has the strongest effect on the self–efficacy of working children but selection theory teaching and exploratory philosophy teaching have the same effect on the responsibility of these children.