Designing Adlerian play therapy program and evaluating its effect on social interest in children with cancer

Cancer has extensive effects on children’s mental health and well-being. One of the problems of children with cancer is social interest. Due to the constant reduction of social interests and their association with quality of life, effective intervention programs are very important. On the other hand, helping childhood cancer survivors and children with cancer to maintain physical, mental and social well-being is one of the most important responsibilities of health professionals and psychologists. It should be noted that the intervention was tailored to the condition of children with cancer. This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of an Adlerian play therapy on enhancing social interest in children with cancer. It was a quasi-experimental study with pretest–posttest with control group. The statistical population consisted of all children with cancer of Yazd City, Iran. Using the convenience sampling method, 30 children were selected as a sample based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria. They were randomly divided into experimental and control groups (n=15/group). The inclusion criteria for children included age 8-12, definitive diagnosis of cancer, at least one course of chemotherapy, not being treated with psychotropic drugs, the child living with both parents, not having any disease other than cancer, not having neuropsychological problems such as mental retardation, hyperactivity, moderate socio-family status and hospitalized for at least one month. The inclusion criteria included reluctance to continue cooperation, not cooperating in completing questionnaire at each of stages or more than two absences in training sessions. In pretest and posttest stage, participants completed the Social Interest Scale for Iranian Children (Alizadeh, 2015(, which included responsibility-task doing, relationship with people-empathy, confidence -assertive, equality vs inferiority-superiority. The weekly sessions of play therapy program included eighteen 45–minute for children. To describe the obtained data, central and dispersion indices, including mean and standard deviation and multivariate and univariate analysis of covariance were used in SPSS 24 at the significance level of 0.05. The results of the multivariate covariance analysis for the subscales of the social interest scale show that the experimental group shows a significant positive change in the subscales after participating in the training program compared to the control group (p <0.05). Adlerian play therapy is effective on social interest in children with cancer and should be offered as a complementary treatment along with other medical and psychological therapies to these children.