de Mooij Brechtje, Fekkes Minne, van den Akker Alithe L, Vliek Lilian, Scholte Ron H J, Overbeek Geertjan
Research Institute of Child Development and Education, University of Amsterdam, 1018WS Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Child Health, TNO, 2316ZL Leiden, the Netherlands.
J Sch Psychol. 2022 Feb;90:60-81. doi: 10.1016/j.jsp.2021.11.003. Epub 2021 Dec 2.
Prior research has related children's prosocial behavior to overall well-being, and stimulating prosocial behavior is the aim of many social-emotional skills interventions. This study assessed if affirming children's autonomy stimulates their psychosocial behavior. We conducted a three-arm microtrial with four repeated measures to assess if a social-emotional skills intervention with an autonomy affirmation component had an additive effect on children's behavior as compared to a "regular" intervention focused exclusively on teaching social-emotional skills and a no-treatment control condition. Our sample consisted of 779 children in Grades 4-6 (M = 10.61, SD = 0.93). Findings from latent change modeling demonstrated that the social-emotional skills intervention with an autonomy affirmation component yielded superior effects as compared to the "regular" intervention and the no-treatment control condition on the improvement of internalizing and externalizing problem behavior in the three-month period after the intervention. The intervention with autonomy affirmation did not yield superior effects on prosociality and social skills, self-efficacy, and self-esteem or self-perceived competence. The absence of these effects may be attributed to the dosage of the interventions implemented-the affirmation of children's autonomy may require more than four sessions to sort observable effects. Overall, however, the findings of this study provide an initial suggestion that it may be beneficial to affirm children's autonomy and prosocial intentions when enhancing children's behavior.
先前的研究已将儿童的亲社会行为与总体幸福感联系起来,激发亲社会行为是许多社会情感技能干预措施的目标。本研究评估肯定儿童的自主性是否会激发他们的心理社会行为。我们进行了一项三臂微试验,采用四项重复测量,以评估与仅专注于教授社会情感技能的“常规”干预措施和无治疗对照条件相比,包含自主性肯定成分的社会情感技能干预措施对儿童行为是否具有累加效应。我们的样本包括779名四至六年级的儿童(M = 10.61,SD = 0.93)。潜在变化模型的结果表明,与“常规”干预措施和无治疗对照条件相比,包含自主性肯定成分的社会情感技能干预措施在干预后三个月内对改善内化和外化问题行为产生了更显著的效果。自主性肯定干预措施在亲社会行为和社交技能、自我效能感、自尊或自我感知能力方面并未产生更显著的效果。这些效果的缺失可能归因于所实施干预措施的剂量——肯定儿童的自主性可能需要超过四个疗程才能产生可观察到的效果。然而,总体而言,本研究结果初步表明,在增强儿童行为时肯定儿童的自主性和亲社会意图可能是有益的。