The effect of hope-based intervention program on Syrian refugee children's hope and resilience levels

In intervention studies with refugee children, it is observed that there is an approach focused on reducing negative aspects rather than improving positive aspects. Interventions with children at-risk involving approaches aims to improve positive charactersitics have gained importance in recent years, however considering Syrian refugee children related studies appear to be insufficient. The purpose of this study is to investigate the efficacy of the hope-based intervention program on the levels of hope and psychological resilience of Syrian refugee children. Pretest-posttest control group- quasi-experimental design was used in the study. The sample consists of 42 Syrian refugee students in 5th grade and of 21 students are in the intervention group and of 21 students in the control group. Children Hope Scale was used to measure students' hope levels; Child and Youth Resilience Measure-Short form was used to measure the psychological resilience levels. After the pretest phase, the students in the intervention group were implemented an intervention program consisted of 6 sessions for 5 weeks. Control group as a waiting list did not receive any intervention in this process. 2x2 Repeated Measures Mixed ANOVA, Independent Sample T test and Dependent Sample T test were conducted for data analysis. Repeated Measures Mixed ANOVA revealed that intervention group had more improvement in hope and psychological resilience levels compared to the control group. Dependent Sample T test revelaed that hope level of the control group siginificantly decreased and the increase in the hope level of the intervention group did not reach a statistically significant level. The Dependent Sample t test revealed that there was no statistically significant change in the psychological resilience scores within the groups. Although there was a statistically significant difference between the posttest hope scores of the groups, there was no significant difference for psychological resilience scores. Research findings support that hope-oriented approaches can be effective in improving the resilience of Syrian refugee children in the long term.