The purpose of study is to examine the effects of a forgiveness education program on elementary school bullying victims and on the increase of forgiveness level and improvement of self concept. To that end, two central questions of this dissertation t...
The purpose of study is to examine the effects of a forgiveness education program on elementary school bullying victims and on the increase of forgiveness level and improvement of self concept. To that end, two central questions of this dissertation that address the theme of the actual effect of forgiveness education program were presented.
First, does forgiveness education program have an effect on the increase of the elementary school bullying victims's forgiveness level?
Second, does forgiveness education program have an influence on the improvement of the elementary school bullying victims's self concept?
First hypothesis, aligned to the research question, is that the experimental group who participates in a forgiveness education program makes a significant increase in forgiveness level than the control group. Within this hypothesis, the experimental group who participates in a forgiveness education program makes a significant increase in the sub-areas of forgiveness level (emotion, cognition, behavior) more than control group.
Second hypothesis is that the experimental group who takes part in a forgiveness education program improves self concept more than control group does. Within this hypothesis, the experimental group who participates in a forgiveness education program shows a considerable increase in the sub-areas of self concept (general self concept, classroom self concept, social self concept, affective self concept ) more than the control group.
In order to answer the questions, I have conducted a pre-test with the sixth grade students at G elementary school in Seoul and selected 24 students who reported being bullying within previous 6 months, group bullying victim scale scored above 10% and forgiveness level were below the average. Then, in the process of the individual interview, 9 students expressed willingness to be experimental group and the other 9 students randomly assigned to control group. Eight sessions were administered for the experimental group twice a week for four consecutive weeks, while the control group had no treatment. Each group had a pre-test, post-test and retention test which was calculated.
The SPSS WIN(version12.0) program was used for quantitative analysis, while MANOVA, Repeated MANOVA, ANOVA, Paired T-test were used to find a forgiveness level between experimental group and control group, differences in forgiveness level and self concept between pre-test and post-test. To complement the limitation of quantitative research, I conducted an analysis of the qualitative research including reflection paper(in each session), researcher's observation note, questionnaire and group, personal interview as well.
The quantitative results are as follows
First, the experimental-group having performed forgiveness education program has increased the level of forgiveness and made a considerable increase in the sub-areas of forgiveness level (emotion, cognition, and behavior) than the control group.
Second, the experimental group with forgiveness education program has improved the level of self concept and showed a significant increase in the sub-areas of self concept(general self concept, classroom self concept, social self concept, affective self concept) than the control group. However, increase of social self concept on the experimental group compare with control group disappered on the retention test.
The result of qualitative data based on comment papers, questionnaire and group, personal interview is affirmative. The results of qualitative analysis indicated that bullying victims could change their negative cognition, affect, behavior towards offender to be more positive after this forgiveness program than before. It also helped the victim's self concept in a positive way as they perceived themselves as being a person who can forgive and also having mellowed character.
As these results show it's proved that the forgiveness education program for bullying victims has positive effects on forgiveness level and improvement of self concept.
In conclusion, it can be said that a meaningful forgiveness education program was developed and implemented elementary school to bullying victims who had a psychological wound. Also the forgiveness education program would be able to be an alternatives for healing, preventing and overcoming of serious elementary school bullying experiences by changing negative cognition, affect, behavior to be more positive.