A Spiritual Touch on Family Resilience: A Positive Psychology Based Group Study From Burnout To Hope

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to develop and implement a spiritually oriented, positive psychology-based group counseling program to increase the level of family resilience of mothers and to determine whether this program produces a difference. The design of this study was a convergent parallel mixed design. In the study, the two databases, after being analyzed separately, were treated together and analyzed using the side-by-side comparison method. A quasi-experimental onegroup pretest-posttest design was used in the quantitative part of the study. The conducted psychological counseling group comprises ten female parents (aged 32 to 40) whose children attend primary school. The participants received eight sessions of the psychological counseling program, each lasting 90 minutes and prepared by the researcher. This mixed research includes the interpretation of pretest-posttest data obtained from the Family Resilience Scale and the Spiritual Resources Scale, as well as the findings that emerged from qualitative observation, interview, recording, and analysis of documents obtained from research participants. The quantitative portion of the research was analyzed using the Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test, while the qualitative portion was analyzed using thematic analysis. The study’s quantitative findings indicate that psychological counseling practice with the group significantly increased the level of family resilience and the use of spiritual resources of the participants. Six themes emerged from the qualitative research analyses: hope, reliance (tawakkul), patience, social support, steps to change, and resilient attitude.