Comparison of the Effectiveness of Unified Transdiagnostic Therapy with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy on Social Adjustment and Self-steem in Child Labours

One of the main problems of working children is the problem of social adjustment and self-esteem. One of the available psychotherapies is cognitive-behavioral therapy and unified transdiagnostic therapy. Thus, the present study was conducted with the aim of comparing the effectiveness of unified transdiagnostic protocol with cognitive behavioral therapy on social adjustment and self-esteem in working children.

The current research was a quasi-experimental study with a pre-test-post-test design. The studied population included all the socially disadvantaged girls (working children) of Tehran in 2019, and 30 people were selected as the study sample with the purposeful sampling method and were randomly placed to two groups of Unified Transdiagnostic therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy. First, the social adjustment questionnaire (Sinha and Singh, 1993) and the self-esteem scale (Pope et al., 1998) were administered as a pre-test on both groups. The first experimental group received cognitive behavioral therapy for eighteen 90-minute sessions and the second experimental group received unified transdiagnostic therapy for fifteen 90-minute sessions. The data were analyzed by the method of analysis of variance with repeated measurements and SPSS version 25 software.

The results showed that both treatments managed to significantly increase their social adjustment and self-esteem in the post-test and follow-up stages in working children. However, the comparison of effectiveness between unified Transdiagnostic Protocol and cognitive-behavioral therapies shows that the effectiveness of the in self-esteem (partial ƞ2=0.34; P<0.01; F=14.46) and social adjustment (partial ƞ2=0.16; P<0.05; F=11.33) was more than cognitive behavioral therapy.

Pediatric transdiagnostic therapy was more effective in improving social adjustment and self-esteem than cognitive-behavioral therapy. Although UP-C has shown promising results, more clinical trials are needed to evaluate the effectiveness of UP-C in different communities and other concurrent mental states.