Effectiveness of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) on Individual and Social Adaptation in Adolescents with Disabled Parents

Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is an emerging form of cognitive-behavioral treatment that is based on functional context.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of ACT in individual and social adaptation in adolescents with disabled parents.

The research design was a quasi-experimental, pre-test and post-test, with the control and experimental groups. The study population included all female adolescents with disabled parents in Mobarakeh, Isfahan, Iran, in 2017. The sample included 30 female adolescents with disabled parents selected using the purposive sampling method. The participants were randomly assigned to both experimental and control groups. The experimental group received ACT tests in 8 sessions, and each session lasted 90 minutes. The participants were assigned to each group before the intervention and at the end of the intervention using the California Psychological Inventory (CPI). Statistical analysis for this study was performed using SPSS-22 software for statistical calculations, and descriptive and inferential statistics were used for data analysis.

According to the results, the mean ± standard deviation (SD) of the individual adaptation and social adaptation variables in the experimental and control groups during the post-test period (130.58 ± 7.88 and 128.50 ± 7.79, respectively), compared to the pre-test (44.8 ± 0.7128 and 45.5 ± 0.5128, respectively), did not increase significantly. Moreover, the results indicated that there was no significant difference in the post-test period between individual adaptation scores (F = 1.191; P = 0.288; η2 = 0.054) and social adaptation scores (F = 0.727; P = 0.403; η2 = 0.033) of the experimental group and the control group.

The results showed that there was no significant difference between individual and social adaptation scores in the post-test stage. This study suggests that treatment attempts were not very effective.