Social skills training group with Turkish immigrants: Results of a pilot study

Abstract

Introduction

Social skills training (SST) is an element of cognitive-behavioral therapy, which focuses to improve verbal-nonverbal behaviors involved in social interactions.

Aims-objectives

To assess the effectiveness of a standardised 8–sessions-SST-group therapy (Hinsch&Pfingsten) in Türkish Immigrants who have anxiety/depressive disorders.

Method

German-Turkish transations-backtranslations of contents and materials of the standardised 8–sessions-SST-group therapy were performed. These weekly eight group sessions applied by two Turkish-psychotherapists to 8 voluntary Turkish-Immigrants (F/M = 4/4, age = 50 ± 5.4), who were in treatment for anxiety/depressive disorders in our transcultural outpatient-clinic in Hannover, Germany. Symtom-Checklist-90 (SCL-90) and Insecurity Questionnaire (I-Q) administered before and after the treatment programm. Seven patients completed pre-post scales.

Results

Table 1 presents the scale scores. There was no significant improvement in global-symptom-severity and insecurity-profiles after the SST. One of the psychotherapists and one of the patients were interviewed to discuss qualitatively possible reasons of that.

Psychoherapist

I think patients were not comfortable with many pencil-paper homeworks. Daily-life-examples were too close to German culture. Therefore it's crucial to culturally modify the sessions.

Patient

I found the sessions-homeworks strict and different from my thinking style and culture.

Conclusions

Qualitative data of this study stated that no improvement may be caused by eurocentristic nature of the psychotherapeutic approach. Berry (2006) suggested that such interventions may generate/exacerbate acculturative-stress and may not be beneficial for the patient. Further studies should investigate effectiveness of culturally-modified SST in Turkish immigrants.

Disclosure of interest

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

Table 1 Scale scores before and after the SST.