The effectiveness of group psychological counseling according to external witness practice in narrative therapy on adolescents' fear of negatively evaluated: mixed method

The aim of this study is to examine the effect of group counseling with and without focusing on the outsider witness practice in Narrative therapy on adolescents' fear of negative evaluation and to obtain adolescents' opinions on the effectiveness of these processes. This research is a mixed method research in terms of using quantitative and qualitative methods together. The basic level of the mixed method research is sequential explanatory design and the advanced level is intervention design. The research was conducted in the 2023-2024 academic year. In the study group of the research, firstly, 71 students who scored the highest in the average value (z score between 2 and 3) for the fear of negative evaluation among 454 students studying in the 10th and 11th grades were identified and preliminary interviews were conducted with these students. As a result of the preliminary interviews, 24 students who volunteered to participate in the study, and whose parents' consent was obtained were selected. The students were randomly assigned equally to the experimental-1, experimental-2, and control groups, with 8 students in each group. The quantitative model of the study was a real experimental model with a 3×3 pre-test, post-test and follow-up with two experimental and one control group. Follow-up interviews were conducted 10 weeks after the intervention. In the qualitative phase of the study, a phenomenological design was used to examine the ongoing effects of the experiment-1 and experiment-2 groups on the fear of negative evaluation after group counseling and in follow-up interviews. In order to obtain the quantitative data of the study, the 12-item Fear of Negative Evaluation Scale-Short Form, which was first developed by Leary (1983) and revised by Carleton, McCreary, Norton, and Asmundson (2006) into plain items, was used.The scale was adapted to Turkish culture by Gök and Yalçınkaya-Alkar (2020). In the study, pretest, posttest and follow-up measurements were made with this scale. After the post-test and follow-up test, six semi-structured questions were used to reach qualitative results. Descriptive analysis was used to analyze qualitative data. According to the quantitative findings of the study, there was a significant difference between the pre-test, post-test, and follow-up test of the two experimental groups in which Narrative therapy intervention was applied, while the difference between the pre-test, post- test, and follow-up test of the control group was not significant. In the other finding, there was a statistically significant difference between the pre-test, post-test, and follow-up test mean scores of the experimental-1, experimental-2, and control groups. This difference is in favor of experiment-1 and experiment-2 groups. However, it was calculated that there was no statistically significant difference between the pre-test, post-test, and follow-up test mean scores between the experimental-1 and experimental-2 groups in which Narrative therapy intervention was applied. According to the qualitative findings, three themes, namely "The effectiveness of group counseling and the reasons for this effectiveness", "The effectiveness of the letter" and "Preservation of the letter" were determined from the opinions of the experiment-1 and experiment-2 groups regarding the group counseling experience applied for the fear of negative evaluation. In addition to the qualitative findings, two themes, "The ongoing effectiveness of group counseling" and "The effectiveness of the letter in follow-up interviews", were obtained for the ongoing effects of group counseling in follow-up interviews for the experiment-1 and experiment-2 groups. In conclusion, the results obtained from the study were discussed in the light of the literatüre, and recommendations were presented.