The Effectiveness of Play Therapy on Aggression Index, a Clinical Trial

Abstract

Introduction: many therapeutic approaches designed to change the behavior of children in over the years. Objective: This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of group play therapy on reducing aggression among school children. Methods: A quasi-experimental research design was with pre-test, post-test and control group. The study population were included all boys and girls of primary school age range 12-7 years old of Tehran. Thus, among the community, 24 children are purposefully selected and were assigned through the Excel software and randomly assigned to two groups (n = 12) and control (n = 12). Play therapy was performed based on Susan M Nel model in the form of independent variables in 10 sessions 45 minutes. Data collected by relational and overt aggression questionnaire and were analyzed by using multivariate variance analysis test and SPSS software version 18. The results indicated that play therapy caused a dramatic drop in violence on all three components of physical, verbal and relational in children (p> 0.05). Results: The findings could have clinical applications.