The effect of communication based education program on communication skills of single parent families with adolescents

In single-parent families, the fact that responsibilities are concentrated in one person can cause communication problems within the family. This study was planned to develop a communication based family life education program that will support single parents with children in early adolescence to communicate effectively with their adolescent children and to evaluate the results of this education program. In this study based on the Taba Model, an interview form consisting of open-ended questions was applied to a total of 40 single parents whose children were studying in a secondary school in the Keçiören district of Ankara in order to determine the educational needs of single parents regarding their communication with adolescents. As a result of content analysis, it was observed that communication problems were grouped under three themes: the adolescent's undesirable behavior towards his/her parent, the problems brought about by adolescence, and the working parent's inability to maintain control. The topics that single parents request regarding the training to be given in this area are the characteristics of adolescence, taking responsibility, anger management, empathy, sharing problems and developing solutions. In line with the information obtained from the needs analysis, an 8-session "Training Program for Improving Communication between Single Parents and Adolescents" was developed. In order to test the effectiveness of the developed training program, a "Pre-Test-Post-Test Control Group Quasi-Experimental Design" was used; a total of 24 single parents whose children were studying at the same school were divided into experimental and control groups, and the "Effective Communication Skills Scale" and the "Parenting Skills and Communication Scale" were applied to both groups before and after training. In addition to training, a brochure summarizing the content of training was distributed to the experimental group. Single parents who participated in training were questioned with scales to determine their views on training process and the trainer. The results show that the communication-based training program developed has a positive effect on single parents' active listening, self-awareness/self-disclosure, empathy and effective communication skills (p<0.05). It was observed that opinions of the intervention group about training process and the trainer were mostly positive. It is thought that the inability to conduct an in-depth examination study during the determination of training needs due to the time constraints of the researcher, the short duration of training, and the inability to conduct a follow-up study after training had an impact on the results.