An Investigation of the Effects of Drama Therapy on Children’s Self-esteem

Abstract

The present study was conducted aiming to examine the effects of drama therapy on the self-esteem of female students. The study was of experimental type, performed using a pretest-posttest control group design where subjects were randomly assigned to the groups. The population consisted of 200 female fifth-graders from elementary schools of Tehran. After screening, 30 of the students who had obtained the lowest scores in the test were selected and randomly assigned to either the experimental or control groups, each of which included 15 students. Then, the experimental group underwent 16 one-hour sessions of drama therapy, while the control group received no intervention. The Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale (SES) was used as a tool. The Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was applied to estimate the reliability and validity of the scale which were 0.9 and 0.7 respectively. The data analysis was carried out through the implementation of the questionnaire in SPSS software in two descriptive (Mean, Standard Error of the Mean, and Standard Deviation) and deductive (Covariance Analysis) parts. The findings showed that drama therapy had a significant impact on self-esteem, where children who received drama therapy gained higher levels of self-esteem than those who received no intervention.