A Group Intervention Research On The Improvement Of Social-emotional Competence Of Rural Left-behind Children

A large number of rural left-behind children are in a special family environment and social environment.The superposition and interaction of the two lead to the prominent social and emotional problems of left-behind children,leading to unclear self-perception,poor self-management competence,lack of interpersonal competence,inability to make responsible decisions,and even aggressive behavior,putting them at greater social risk.Elementary school is a critical period for children’s socioemotional development and thus a prime stage for intervention.Without intervention,children probably encounter more obstacles to their future development and develop emotional problem behaviors.Social-emotional competencies have an ameliorative,preventive,and promotive role in reducing emotional-behavioral problems.Currently,there is a tendency for the government to intervene less in a preventive manner and more in an ex post facto manner.Therefore,it is necessary to intervene in the social-emotional competence of rural left-behind children to improve their social-emotional competence.Based on the clarification of the problem theory of social-emotion of rural left-behind children and the causal logic of the intervention program,this study applied social information processing theory to design an intervention manual for rural left-behind children aged 7-12 years old in elementary school with significantly deficient social-emotional ability as the study subjects,and carried out the intervention in Village C,a key support village for rural revitalization in County W,Chongqing City.In this study,a quasi-experimental design was used,and 34 rural left-behind children were matched to two groups as the experimental and control groups,according to gender,age,grade level,and left-behind status.Based on a social information processing perspective to understand the causes of social-emotional problems of rural left-behind children from multiple perspectives,such as individual,family,and school,the intervention adopted a growth group intervention program with the aim to improve their socio-emotional competence and social information processing competence.The intervention was conducted once a week for two hours over a period of two months,with a total of eight group activities,.Seventeen rural left-behind children in the experimental group received the intervention,and 17 children in the control group did not receive any intervention.Before and after the intervention,both groups received pre-tests and post-tests of socio-emotional competence.After the intervention,the results of this study were analyzed using paired-sample t-tests,and the results showed that(1)the post-test scores of social-emotional competence were significantly higher than in the pre-test in the experimental group,while there was no significant difference between the pre-test and post-test scores of social-emotional competence in the control group.(2)The experimental group scored significantly higher than the control group in the four stages of social information processing competence: information encoding,response generation,response decision,and response execution,while the scores in the three stages of cue interpretation,goal clarification,and response evaluation were not significantly different compared to the control group.The experimental group showed an overall improvement in social information processing competence.Overall,the intervention to enhance the social-emotional competence of rural left-behind children from a social information processing perspective achieved significant results in the short term.This study found that using a social information processing perspective effectively enhanced the social-emotional competence of rural left-behind children,which helped to transform the intervention perspective of social-emotional competence of rural left-behind children and respond to social-emotional issues from multiple perspectives.The intervention design was based on growth groups,oriented to social-emotional needs,and the activity format fitted the connotation of children’s social-emotional competence and is applicable to the older students in elementary school.