The Effect of Online Solution-Focused Brief Therapy on Parents with High Level of Anxiety in the COVID 19 Pandemic: A Randomized Controlled Study

Abstract

Aim: The aim of this study was to determine the anxiety levels of parents with children aged 3-6 years due to the COVID 19 pandemic and to examine the effects of Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) applied to parents with high level of anxiety. Methods: The study was conducted as a parallel-group, randomized controlled design. The sample of the study consisted of 77 parents who were randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups (control group n = 40; intervention group n = 37). One session of online SFBT was applied to the intervention group each week and 4 sessions were applied in total. No intervention was applied to the control group. The data were collected using introductory information form and State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI). SPSS programme and Analysis of Moment Structures (AMOS) 23 application were used in the analysis of the data. Structural equation modeling was used to examine a hypothesized model that SFBT has both direct and indirect effects on anxiety levels of parents. Results: The state and trait anxiety mean scores of the intervention group decreased compared to the pre-intervention mean scores after the implemented programme. While this difference between state anxiety scores was statistically significant (p≤ .001), the difference between trait anxiety scores was not statistically significant (p> .05). There was no statistically significant difference between the pre-test and post-test STAI-S and STAI-T total scores of the control group. Conclusions: In the study, it has been found that SFBT applied to parents with high level of anxiety is an effective method in reducing the state anxiety levels of parents.