THE EFFECTIVENESS OF RESILIENCE TRAINING ON QUALITY OF LIFE, HAPPINESS, HOPE, AND PSYCHOLOGICAL WELL-BEING OF OVERWEIGHT INDIVIDUALS

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of resilience training on quality of life, happiness, hope, and psychological well-being of overweight individuals. The method of this study was a quasi-experimental study with a pre-test-post-test design and a control group. The research population was overweight students of the Central Tehran Azad University in the academic year 2010-2011, of whom 30 were selected through purposive sampling and randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups (15 people in each group). First, in the pre-test phase, individuals from both groups responded to the World Health Organization Quality of Life Questionnaire (WHOQOL-BREF; World Health Organization Working Group, 1996), the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire-Short Form (OHI; Hills & Argyle, 2002), the Adult Hope Scale (AHS; Schneider and colleagues, 1991), and the Riff Psychological Well-Being Scale (RSPWB; Riff, 1989). Then, the experimental group underwent 12 sessions of resilience training for 1.5 hours, and no intervention was performed on the control group during this period. In the post-test phase, both groups again answered the research questionnaires. Data analysis was performed using descriptive statistics and analysis of covariance tests in SPSS-23 software. The findings showed that the resilience training course was able to significantly improve the quality of life, happiness, hope, and psychological well-being in the experimental group (P < 0.05). Given these findings, it is suggested that resilience training be used as an effective approach in improving the psychological state of overweight individuals.