The effectiveness of a cognitive-behavioral counseling program to reduce symptoms of depression of Syrian refugee women

Abstract

The current research aims to prepare a scale of depression, and design an experimental cognitive-behavioral counseling program to reduce symptoms of depression among Syrian refugee women. The sample of the study consisted of (30) women who live at Qushtapa camp in Erbil, the researchers randomly selected (15) women for the group of experimental and (15) women for the control group, both groups were balanced in the case of (Depression, Age, Education level, Financial, and Marital status). The researchers build the counseling program based on the Cognative-behavioral theories of (Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis). The program comprised (16) counseling sessions, two sessions per week, and the duration of each session was (60) minutes. The psychometric characteristics of the scale were completed. The result demonstrates that the (McGogian) value is (0.61), which is acceptable and indicated that the program has high effectiveness. Furthermore, there is a statistically significant difference between the mean scores of refugee women for both experimental and control groups after the implementation of the program at the statistical level (0.05) in favor of the experimental group. Based on the research findings, the researchers proposed several recommendations.