The effectiveness of a psychological package based on positive psychology on social adjustment, self-esteem, and self-control

Determining the effectiveness of a psychological package based on positive psychology on social adjustment, self-esteem, and self-control in sixth grade elementary school students

A controlled, double-blind, randomized, phase 2 clinical trial with parallel groups on 30 sixth grade elementary school students. The rand function of Excel software was used for randomization.

This research will use a field experimental research method and a large-scale pre-test and post-test design. The research will be conducted in elementary schools in Baghmalek city. All participants, intervention implementers, and evaluators who interpret the data, and all information will be kept confidential and an abbreviation will be used for the participants.

Inclusion Criteria: Participants must be at least 11 and at most 12 years old. Participants must be sixth-grade students in Bagh-e Malek County. The participants and their parents must provide informed consent to participate in the study. Exclusion Criteria: Having physical illnesses that could interfere with the treatment process. Taking psychiatric medications.

Intervention group: Positive psychology-based intervention based on the Ebrahimi psychological package is implemented in 8 60-minute sessions, one session per week, in a group setting for sixth grade elementary school students. Control group: They do not receive any intervention during the research period.

Social adjustment; self-esteem; self-control.

In this study, a simple randomization method is used to assign participants to two experimental groups (psychological intervention based on positive psychology) and control groups. The randomization unit in this study is sixth grade elementary school students in Baghmalek city schools who are eligible to enter the study. First, a complete list of volunteer students who have been screened and selected based on entry and exit criteria is prepared. Then, each participant is assigned a unique numerical identification code. These codes are entered into the Random Number Generator software and a random number is generated for each individual. After generating these numbers, the participants are sorted in ascending order based on the value of the random number. Then, the students are assigned to two groups; sequentially, the first 15 people on the list are assigned to the experimental group and the next 15 people are assigned to the control group. With this method, the order of entry into the study, the school they attend, and the researcher's knowledge of the students will not play any role in determining the group. To conceal allocation, the person responsible for recording data and implementing the randomization process in the software will be completely independent of the researcher conducting the intervention and the evaluators of the questionnaires (social adjustment, self-esteem, and self-control) and will not have the possibility of knowing the process of implementing the sessions or interfering with the allocation of subjects. Also, the identification codes of the students will be kept confidential and separate from their identity details; therefore, the possibility of prediction or bias in assigning each participant to a group before the randomization process is implemented is minimized and fully controlled.

In order to control bias and improve the internal validity of the study, this study was designed with a double-blind protocol; in this way, the outcome assessor (responsible for administering the social adjustment, self-esteem, and self-control questionnaires) and the data analyst will be kept unaware of the allocation of sixth-grade elementary school students to the experimental and control groups. In this process, the outcome assessor will collect data at all stages of the pretest, posttest, and follow-up, without knowing whether the subjects were members of the positive intervention group or the control group, in order to prevent any bias in the measurement; also, all raw data will be provided to the statistical analyst with anonymous codes (such as groups 1 and 2), and the true nature of the groups will not be revealed until the end of the data analysis process. All allocation steps will be performed by an independent person from the research team, and the decoding of the allocation codes will only be done after the final completion of the statistical analyses.

Participant data is completely confidential and I do not intend to publish it.