Speaker
Description
Mental health problem among children is increasingly a global concern in the current days. Children living in war and conflict settings are affected by a constellation of stressors that threaten their mental health. Thus, promotion and prevention interventions targeting to children affected such crisis are helpful to enhance positive aspects of mental health and psychosocial functioning. Taking this in to account, the main intention of this project was to conduct interventional research primarily aiming to enhance the resilience of elementary school children in Gondar City so that they can thrive despite the current adversities of war and conflict situations. The research followed quantitative research approach with cluster randomized controlled trial design and data were collected from primary school children using questionnaire. After securing the quality of the data through proper screening and inspection, both descriptive (mean, standard deviation) and inferential statistics (one-sample t-test and independent samples t-test) were used to analyze the data. The findings revealed that children scored half of the total score on depression, anxiety and stress mental health measurement components. As regards gender difference, female children scored statistically significant high mean difference than male counterparts only on anxiety. The intervention results revealed that the experimental group scored statistically significant higher mean score than control group. Based on these findings, it is recommended that schools, professionals, educations offices and organizations working on children should design strategies to strengthen school-based interventions aiming to reduce the mental health problems of children by enhancing their psychological resilience.
