A comparative study of the effectiveness of the solution-focused brief therapy and mindfulness-based therapy to reduce educational stress in junior high school students in Tehran

Abstract

Introduction: Educational stress is a negative psychological condition; with its cognitive and emotional components, threatens students' health. Aim: This study aimed to compare the effectiveness of the solution-focused brief therapy and mindfulness-based therapy to reduce educational stress in junior high school students. Method: Through the framework of a clinical trial plan with pre-test and post-test and quarterly post hoc test, this study was conducted. In a purposive sampling manner, sixty students; among the first year of junior high school male students in Tehran district 13thin the school year 2019-2020, were selected and then surveyed by Don, Hu and Zhou (2011) Adolescent Educational Stress Scale and were randomly divided into 3 groups of 20: control group, solution-focused treatment group and mindfulness treatment group. Then the intervention process was run on the experimental groups and after three months the follow-up test was rerun. The data were analyzed by using SPSS-26 and the covariance analysis and mixed-design analysis of variance tests. Results: This study brought light on the effectiveness of both treatments methods in reducing educational stress among students, but the mindfulness method (Eta2=0.357) worked better rather the brief solution-focused intervention method(Eta2=0.318) to reduce students' stress (P<0.05). Conclusion: In regard to use mindfulness therapy primarily, therapists are highly recommended to use both the solution-focused brief intervention and mindfulness therapy to treat the adolescent students with educational stress.

Research on the Solution-Focused Approach in 2022: A Scoping Review

“…In line with a well-known Dodo Bird Verdict, stating that all approaches to change produce similarly good outcomes (Luborsky et al, 2002;Wampold, 2010), the majority of studies showed similar effectiveness of SFP to other known treatments. Nevertheless, while three studies found significant results in favor of the other treatments (Ghari Saadati et al, 2022;Ghorbani et al, 2022b;Zafarghandi et al, 2022), only one study (Johnson et al, 2022) reported significant results in favor of SFP, yet compared to two out of three examined other approaches. This trend from the 2022 research shows that SFP is an effective approach, more often than not as effective as other established approaches.…”

“…Among 11 such studies, 63.3% (k = 7) showed that SFP produced similar outcomes to schema therapy (Hashemi Saraj et al, 2022), CBT or CBT combined with motivational interviewing (Johnson et al, 2022;Naseriniya & Smkhani Akbarinejhad, 2022), emotion-focused therapy (Bagheriniya et al, 2022), narrative therapy (Oktava et al, 2022), guidance (Sagar & Özabaci, 2022), mindfulness based CBT (Naseriniya & Smkhani Akbarinejhad, 2022), and behavioral couple therapy (Ghorbani et al, 2022a). Three studies (27.3%) reported significant results in favor of other treatments, including mindfulness (Zafarghandi et al, 2022), behavioral couple therapy (Ghorbani et al, 2022b), and compassion-focused therapy (Ghari Saadati et al, 2022). Finally, only one (9.4%) study (Johnson et al, 2022) reported significant outcome results in favor of the SFP compared to spiritual intervention and client-centered therapy, but similar outcomes when compared to CBT.…”