فاعلية برنامج إرشاد جمعي في تنمية الالتزام الديني والمسؤولية الاجتماعية لدى الأحداث الجانحين في سلطنة عمان

Abstract

Many societies around the world are facing increasing numbers of youth involved in anti-social behaviors, and sometimes even committing crimes. While the mainstream counselling models mainly emphasize psychodynamic, cognitive, behavioural and humanistic interventions, many scholars have recognized that for people from religious backgrounds, integrating religious beliefs and practices in guidance and counselling programs yields better and faster results. This study aimed at developing a group guidance program, incorporating Islamic religious beliefs and practices, and investigating its effectiveness in developing and enhancing religious commitment and social responsibility among juvenile delinquents at a selected youth reform centre in Oman. The study employed the quasi-experimental approach to design a one group experiment owing to the limited number of participants and challenges in getting access to them. In all, 10 youth participated in the study. They attended a total of seventeen (17) sessions of the group counselling program. The guidance sessions were conducted three sessions per week. Statistical analysis yielded means and standard deviations of the experimental group to test the level of religious commitment and social responsibility in the pre-test, post-test and follow-up phases of the program. Wilcoxon Signed-Ranks was used to verify the statistical significance of the differences between the scores of religious commitment and social responsibility among experimental group members. The results of the study revealed that there were statistically significant differences in religious commitment and social responsibility (at the significance level of 0.05) between the pre-test and post-test. This is preliminary evidence for the effectiveness of the group counseling program used in this study. The results of the study also showed that there were no statistically significant differences in the significance level (0.05) between post-test and follow-up scores of religious commitment and social responsibility. Further studies need to be conducted to generalize these findings on larger populations of youth in the Muslim world. Moreover, there is a need to devise mechanisms to sustain the positive effects of the program after the end of the experiment.