The effect of peer supported anger managament training program on anger management skills of high school students

The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of peer supported anger management training program on anger management skills of high school students. With this purpose, `Anger Trait Anger Expression Inventory? was administered to 346 tenth graders studying in Adana, Kozan, Kozan High Schools and students who did not answer two or more questions were excluded so the number of students were reduced to 311. After the administration of the inventory, students with high anger trait scores were identified. For presenting the training program, advertisement activities in classrooms were conducted and posters were hanged up to the different places of the school. Pre-interviews were conducted with volunteer students and during the interviews personal information form developed by the researcher was utilized, then the students were assigned to the groups by taking the gender, socio-economic status and family conditions into account. Thirteen students to the experiment group 1, thirteen students to the experiment group 2 and thirteen students to the control group were assigned in the study. Two of the closest friends of the students in the experiment group 2 were identified through the sociometry study and these students were included in classroom guidance activities.The experiment groups received cognitive-behavioral therapy based psycho-educational anger management skill training program consisted of 90 minutes ten sessions while the closest friends of the students in the experiment group 2 participated in clasroom guidance activities. The control group received no treatment. The anger management training program that experiment groups received is a structured psycho-educational group intervention that is skill improvement oriented and that has educational content and exercies using cognitive-behavioral therapy techniques and also including interactive process.For comparing the pre-test and post-test results of the experiment groups, `Anger Trait Anger Expression Inventory? adapted by Özer (1994) was used. The scale was used as a pretest and posttest measurement to the experiment and control groups but it couldn?t be used as a follow-up measurement in control group so the follow-up measurement could be obtained only from the students in experiment groups. Quasi experimental design was used in the research and in the data analysis part One way ANOVA, Co-variance-analysis for comparing the pretest and postest results of experiment and control groups and T-test analysis for follow-up measures of related samples was used.The results of the study indicate that anger management skills training program is effective in experiment groups 1 and 2 for reducing the anger trait and gaining anger control and the results are more significant in peer supported experiment group 2 than the experiment group 1. There was found to be no significant difference between experimental and control groups in anger inward and anger outward subscales. It was found that the program is effective in reducing the anger trait of students and helping them to gain anger control, especially the results are more favorable in peer supported experiment group 2 than the experiment group 1. Moreover, in the follow-up test applied after two and half month from the experiment showed that the effect still continues in experiment groups.In the light of these findings, the results were discussed and suggestions were found out for the professionals in the area and future researchers.Key Words: Anger management skill training program, anger control, adolescent peer education.