The effect of group counseling program for siblings of atypical children on their anxiety levels

The aim of this research was examining the impact of group counseling program ob siblings of atypical children's anxiety level. This research was conducted in Metin Sabanci Special Education and Rehabilitation Center between 2018 and 2020. Twenty siblings of atypical children in different dissability groups were participated in this study. Five boy and five girl were included experimental group and the same was done for the control group. The age range of participants were determined from 8 to 11. The group counseling program that was developed by research longed six-week and each sessions were one hour length. This group counseling program were applied to the participants in experimental group while there is no application for participants in control group. The design of this research was quasi-experimental research with pre-test and post-test and control group. Spence Children Anxiety Scale that was developed by Spence in 1988 and adapted by Direktör and Serin in 2017 was used to measure participants' anxiety score before and after the group process. To analyze the collected data, Wilcoxon Signed Rank and Mann-Whitney U tests were used by researcher. At the end of the analyzing process, it was found that the six-week group counseling program was developed by researcher was effective on siblings of atypical children's anxiety level. Reduction was observed in participants' anxiety score at the end of this process. The findings obtained in this study were evaluated according to the current researches and extant literature. Keywords: Children with Dissability, Trait Anxiety, Siblings of Atypical Children