The purposes of this study are, first to check if group art therapy is effective in improving ego identity of university students, second, to see a possibility to make use of the therapy program in practice, then ultimately to help the students establ...
The purposes of this study are, first to check if group art therapy is effective in improving ego identity of university students, second, to see a possibility to make use of the therapy program in practice, then ultimately to help the students establish their own ego identity or true self for university life. To do so, the following issues are made and the answers are pursued.
First, is the group art therapy program effective in improving ego identity of university students?
Second, is the group art therapy program effective on the subcategories of ego identity of university students?
Study subjects are sixty students of P-university in Pyeongtack city in Gyeonggi province, selected randomly from volunteers to participate the program, who understand the purpose of this study through public information or advertisement of the group art therapy program. They are divided into the control group of thirty students and the experimental group of the other thirty that is then subdivided into three small groups of ten. Each subgroup received a group art therapy program consisting of a total of 12 sessions, once or twice a week, and each session lasting 90 minutes. To verify the effects of the therapy program, pretest and posttest are made on ego identity before and after the program, respectfully. The comparison of pretest and posttest scores are analyzed by SPSS Window 12.0 in terms of 'paired t-test' for ego identity as a whole as well as the subcategories of it.
The results from the study are as follows.
First, the group art therapy program shows a positive effect in improving ego identity of the university students. That is, according to the analysis of comparison between pretest and posttest for both experimental and control groups, all three subgroup of the experimental group, unlike the control group, have significantly a positive effect on ego identity after the program participation.
Second, the group art therapy program displays positive influence on the subcategories of ego identity of the university students, to the extent the ego identity pretest including the subcategories of autonomy, self acceptance, future reliability, goal orientation, leadership, and intimacy averaged higher than that of posttest after the students' program participation.
The study thus verified that the group art therapy program is effective in improving the level of ego identity of the university students. Consequently, it is suggested that this study will be used as basic material or a starting point for helping the students, who are in trouble with ego identity, establish a firm identity of ego with the help from a short-term group art therapy program.