Abstract
With high rates of psychological distress reported amongst children internationally, the development and evaluation of new program initiatives is critical in order to meet the challenge of this burgeoning issue. Both acceptance and commitment therapy and adventure therapy are emerging as popular strategies to elevate psychological wellbeing. This small-scale program evaluation focuses on nine upper primary school-aged children enrolled in a specialist school in Australia for children with challenging behavior and/or emotional needs. Participants completed a newly developed 8-week intervention entitled 'ACT in the Outdoors' which combined key principles of both acceptance and commitment therapy and adventure therapy. The program was evaluated via a combination of pre and post participant psychological measures, and post interviews with participants and teachers. The results of this small-scale preliminary evaluation suggest that a portion of the participating children reported improvements in psychological wellbeing and skill development. Improvements appear to be mitigated by attendance and level of psychological wellbeing upon program entry. Based on this premise, the results suggest that more research is warranted to further understand the potential benefit of this innovative interdisciplinary approach.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 1565 |
Number of pages | 9 |
Journal | Frontiers in Psychology |
Volume | 9 |
Issue number | AUG |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2018 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2018 Tracey, Gray, Truong and Ward.
Open Access - Access Right Statement
Copyright © 2018 Tracey, Gray, Truong and Ward. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.Keywords
- acceptance and commitment therapy
- behavior disorders in children
- child mental health
- cognitive therapy
- outdoor education
- Adventure therapy
- Acceptance and commitment therapy
- Mental health
- At-risk children
- Wellbeing