A Comparison of Dysfunctional Attitudes between the Runaway Girls and Normal Ones

Considering the importance of Coping with stressor changes in life and the effect of Dysfunctional attitudes in using avoidance mechanism and passive coping (runaway) and forming schema in traumatic family situation and expressing them on critical period of adolescence, the purpose of this research is to study the effect of dysfunctional attitudes on runaway girls. The design used in this research was the ex post facto. The subjects consisted of 60 runaway girls organized in shelters and 60 normal girls at Tehran night schools that in three domains (age, educational and economical status) were similar to them. Both groups were selected through stratified random sampling and responded to weissman and beck Dysfunctional Attitudes Scale (DAS). The results showed that the DAS score and scores of runaway girls in different lower scales were significantly higher than norma1. The results, also, showed that there was not a significant relationship between DAS score with age and economical status, but we found significant relationship between DAS and educational situation. The results showed that, Dysfunctional Attitudes may serve as vulnerability factors that placed individuals at greater risk for runaway. Also considering the formatting cognitive schema in child period (beck theory) we can say that the age of runaway girls have no effect on their cognitive distortion. Also, the results showed relationship between running away and education level.