The Effectiveness of Group Social Work Intervention on Reducing Frustration and Moderating Negative Emotions of Cancer Patients

Long-term treatments and high levels of tension in cancer have a long-term negative effect on the patients’ mental health and cause psychological problems such as increased worry, despair, and negative emotions. In this regard, the present research was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of group social work intervention in reducing worry and frustration and moderating cancer patients’ negative emotions.

This research was a semi-experimental pre-test-post-test study with a control group, and 30 patients with cancer at Birjand, Iran, were randomly selected and assigned to two experimental (n=15) and control groups (n=15) using convenience sampling. In this procedure, the experimental group received group social work intervention training during eight sessions, but the control group did not receive any training. The data collection instruments were Watson, Clark, and Telgen’s (1988) positive and negative affect scale and Beck et al.’s (1985) frustration scale. Univariate and multivariate analyses of covariance were used to analyze the data.

The results of data analysis showed that the observed difference between the mean scores of frustration and negative emotions of the participants of the experimental-control groups according to the group membership in the post-test phase was significant with 95% confidence (P<0.05) and the effect of group social work intervention was 0.29 and 0.50 for the frustration and negative emotions, respectively

Group social work intervention should be used to reduce the psychological problems of patients with cancer.