The Effectiveness of Positive Psychotherapy on Hope and Quality of Academic Life of Slow-Paced Students: A Quasi-Experimental Study

Slow-paced disorder causes a decrease in students’ hope for life and the quality of academic life. Positive psychotherapy is one of the interventions that improves mental health in people, including students. Therefore, the present study was conducted with the aim of determining the effectiveness of positive psychotherapy on the hope and quality of academic life of slow-paced students.

The research method was quasi-experimental with a pre-test and post-test design with a control group. The statistical population of this research was all the slow-paced students of Zahedan City in the academic year 2022-2023 (69 people). The sample members consisted of 40 students who were willing to cooperate and met the inclusion criteria, who were selected by convenience sampling method and randomly assigned into experimental (n=20) and control (n=20) groups. The experimental group received positive psychotherapy intervention for 10 sessions and the control group did not receive any intervention. The research tools were Williams and Batten’s Quality of School Life Questionnaire (1981) and Miller’s Hope Scale (1988). Multivariate analysis of covariance was used for data analysis.

The findings indicated that positive psychotherapy is effective on hope (F=92.55) and on all scales of the quality of academic life of slow-paced students (p<0.001). In other words, positive psychotherapy slowly increased the hope and quality of academic life of the students.

The results showed that positive psychotherapy is effective on the hope and quality of academic life of slow-paced students. Therefore, the use of this treatment method is recommended in the growth of hope and quality of academic life of slow-paced students.