Comparison of the Effectiveness of Kendall's coping cat group program and parent management training for social anxiety, resilience and physical aggression of primary school students

This research aimed to compare the effectiveness of Kendall's coping cat group therapy program and parent management training on the level of social anxiety, physical aggression, and resilience of students with anxiety disorders. The research method was semi-experimental with a pre-test-post-test design, and a 45-day follow-up period with two experimental groups and a control, group. The statistical population included primary school students with anxiety disorders in Mobarakeh city in the academic year  2021-2022. In this research, 45 primary school students with anxiety disorder were selected by purposeful sampling method and randomly placed in experimental and control groups of 15 people. Students of the first experimental group participated in ten 60-minute sessions of the Coping Cat Program (CCP) and mothers of the second experimental group participated in ten 75-minute sessions of Parental Management Training (PMT). To collect information, Spence's (1997) Anxiety Scale (SCAS), Merrell's (2011) (SEARS), and Nelson's (2000) Aggression (ChIA) questionnaires were used. Mixed variance analysis with repeated measurement and the Bonferroni test was used to analyze the data. The results showed that both the adaptive cat program and parental management training significantly reduced social anxiety and physical aggression and increased resilience compared to the control group (P<0.01). The effect of both interventions has a lasting effect up to the 45-day follow-up stage. Also, according to the difference in averages, there is no significant difference between the effectiveness of the two programs on social anxiety and resilience (p>0.05), but the effectiveness of the Adaptable Cat program on physical aggression is greater than that of the parent management training program.