Hopelessness and Dysfunctional Attitude in Children Under the Support of Child Labor Centers in the South of Tehran in 2021

One of the problems that threatens children in developing countries is the issue of child labor. Working children have lower hope for the future than their normal peers. Working in childhood can have a negative effect on the growth and cognitive performance of children. This study aims to investigate the prevalence of hopelessness and dysfunctional attitudes in working children of southern Tehran.

This is a descriptive-cross-sectional study. The study population consists of all working children and adolescents engaged in child labor aged 10-18 years under the support of child laborers support centers in the south of Tehran. Of these, 247 were selected for the study using a continuous sampling method that lasted 8 months from April to November 2021. The data collection tools were a demographic checklist and the children's dysfunctional attitude scale (DAS) of D’Alessandro and Burton, and the children's hopelessness scale (CHS) of Kazdin (1986). The collected data were analyzed using descriptive statistics (mean, standard deviation, frequency and percentage) and inferential statistics (analysis of variance, independent t-test, and Pearson's correlation test) in SPSS software, version 16. The significance level was set at 0.05.

The results showed that the average score of hopelessness (5.78±2.60) with a standard deviation of 5.78±2.60 was at a favorable level, among the dimensions of hopelessness, the average score of the dimension of future expectations (3.87±1.87) in hopelessness was higher than the dimension of happiness (2.00±1.39). The average ineffective attitude in the study was 96.16±74.11. Hopelessness only had a statistically significant relationship with the work status of the children in the study (P=0.029). There was no statistically significant correlation between ineffective attitude and hopelessness of working children (P<0.050). Hopelessness only had a statistically significant relationship with the work status of the children in the study (P=0.029).

It is recommended that interventional studies be conducted to improve the future expectations of children, and focus more on working children whose guardian is someone other than parents. Given the lack of a significant relationship between dysfunctional attitudes and hopelessness in working children in the south of Tehran, it is recommended that the mediating and confounding variables be investigated.