Investigation of the effect of story based and with parent involvement social emotional development support program on children 'S respect for diversity and self-concept

The purpose of this research is to examine the effects of story based and with parent involvement social emotional development support program developed for children in the 5-6 age group on respect for diversity skills and self-concept levels. The research was carried out on children aged 5-6 years studying at Sultan Alparslan Kindergarten under the Ministry of National Education in Istanbul. In this research, pretest-posttest control grouped experimental design was used. The study group of the research is consisted of 26 children in which there are 14 children in the experimentalgroup and 12 in the control group. The "Social Emotional Development Support Program" developed within the scope of the research was applied to the children in the experimental group once a week for 13 weeks, and no intervention was made to the children in the control group. Children composing experimental and control group were evaluated with data obtained from "A Scale of Respect for Diversities" for the respect for diversity skills , "DeMoulin Self-Concept Developmental Scale (6 years)" for self-concept. Pretest and posttest was conducted on both groups with forenamed scales and permenance test run was conducted only on experimental group after eight weeks of last test runs. Following the scope of analyses; Mann-Whitney U Test between groups, Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test within groups were used. All analyses were performed with 95% confidence interval and value p<0.05 was accepted as statistically significant. It is concluded that the Social Emotional Development Support Programme which was applied to experimental group have a positive effect on the children's respect for diversity skills and self-perception levels, and this effect was precipitated permanent based on the findings of the data analysed. Key Words: Respect for diversity, self-concept, social emotional development support program, parent involvement, children's books.