| The modality of preschool peer play psychotherapy was introduced over 40 years ago. Case reports and theoretical rationale support its use, suggesting that it facilitates participants' development in social, emotional, cognitive, and language domains. This project studied preschool therapeutic playgroups in order to discover and explore the process that occurred in them. A grounded theory approach was utilized to analyze group leaders' notes from the Early Childhood Group Therapy (ECGT) component of the Head Start-ECGT: Relationships for Growth (RfG) project. A 3-phase process of trust-building, exploration, and cohesion was discovered in which participants' and therapists' roles changed over time as children relied less on therapists and more on each other as they created "the power of group" (A. N. Houston, personal communication, June 9, 2004). Testing of this newly-discovered process on more groups is needed as a precursor to devising ways to demonstrate the value of the process in affecting and measuring therapeutic change and in learning more about specific therapeutic characteristics that are related to treatment effectiveness and what types of children benefit most from this treatment modality. |
