The Effect of Art Therapy-Focused Group Counseling on Children's Social Emotional Skills

The purpose of the current study is to reveal the perception of group counselors regarding children's social emotional skills with a focus on art therapy. In this study, a partially mixed simultaneous equal-status design from mixed design models was used. The study group of the research consisted of 10–11-year-old students (n: 28, female: 14, male: 14) studying in a public middle school in the 2022–2023 academic year. In the collection of data; Personal Information Form, Social-Emotional Skills Perception Scale, session diaries, process evaluation form and the researcher's observations were used. The art therapy-oriented group counseling program is a program consisting of a total of 11 sessions, each session lasting 45 min. In the analysis of quantitative data, Mann Whitney U and Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test were performed using SPSS 25.0 program, and in the qualitative analysis part, descriptive analysis was carried out through Nvivo 12 program. As a result of the study, it was concluded that the Social-Emotional Skills Perception Scale scores of the control and experimental groups did not show a significant difference between the groups and there was no significant difference between the pretest and posttest scores of the experimental group. A significant difference was found in the follow-up test results applied to the experimental group 3 months later. In the qualitative findings of the study, it was found that the participants' awareness of their communication skills, problem solving skills and stress coping skills increased and improved in their evaluations of the sessions and the process. When the quantitative and qualitative findings of the study are evaluated together, it can be stated that there is a relationship between participation in art therapy-focused group counseling and the development of social-emotional skill perception.