The Effectiveness Of Hope Group Counseling On Improving Hope In Offenders

Hope is an important theory of positive psychology and has a significant impact on human developments.The purposes of this study were to design and revise the group counseling program so as to fit for offenders,to explore the interventional effectiveness of the hope group counseling program on hope,to investigate whether improving hope can alleviate the anxiety and depression of offenders,and to provide a new method for psychological treatment of offenders.Twenty-four male offenders were assigned to experimental group(12 subjects)and control group(12 subjects).The subjects in the experimental group were treated for 8 weeks and 90 minutes per week of group intervention.The subjects in the control group did not receive any treatment.All of the participants completed the Adult Dispositional Hope Scale,the Self-Rating Anxiety Scale,and the Self-Rating Depression Scale before and after group counseling.Besides,the study involved the follow-up test.The results are as follows:(1)The hope group intervention was taken shape.(2)According to the pre-test and the post-test score,the hope as well as agency thought and pathway thought and anxiety in experimental group achieved statistical significance and the depression had no significant difference.The differences of hope and depression achieved statistical significances in control group.(3)According to the pre-test and the follow-up test score,a significant enhancement in hope and significant increases in agency thought and pathway thought and declining anxiety were observed in the experimental group,but the depression had no significant difference.There were no significant differences in any factors of the control group.According to the post-test and the follow-up test score,the hope,agency thought and pathway thought as well as anxiety and depression of the experimental group had no significant differences.The differences in anxiety and depression in the control were significant,while the other factors had no significant differences.(4)After the Johnson-Neyman method of analysis,the pre-test and post-test group have a significant immediate effectiveness on the intervention when members' score were between 8 to 37 points on the pre-test of the hope,and the pathway thought was supposed to be between 4 to 19 points.(5)According to the pre-tests and the follow-up test score,there were significant differences in hope,agency thought and pathway thought and anxiety between the experimental group and the control group.There was no significant difference in depression.According to the post-test and the follow-up test score,the experimental group and the control group hope reach the statistical significance in hope and the agency thought,and the pathway thought showed remarkable difference;the anxiety mood significantly decreased.The depression difference was not remarkable.The results of this study showed that the group counseling intervention was effective,which could improve the level of hope for offenders and could ease anxiety mood.It was proven that selecting the middle level of hope of the offenders could enhance the effectiveness of the intervention.In the process of intervention,it was important to focus on the higher level of anxiety mood of offenders so as to enhance their ability of pathway thinking and to ease their anxiety level.