| Summary: | Generally speaking, institutionalised children and adolescents are at greatly increased risk of serious mental and behavioural problems, up to seven times more than their peers. Life skills- based interventions using peer enforcement have been introduced as effective program to improve adolescents’ emotional and behavioral health. Therefore, the current randomized control study aimed to determine, if a life skills-based intervention could improve
the emotional health and self-esteem among Malaysian adolescents in orphanages. Overall, 271 male and female adolescents (13–18 years old) from 8 orphanages in Klang valley, Malaysia participated in the study. Comparing the intervention to control group within 3 points of time, the finding of the study showed that immediately after finishing the interventional sessions (post-test), the mean scores of depression (F = 33.80, P<0.001, η2 = 0.11), anxiety (F = 6.28, P = 0.01, η2 = 0.02), stress (F = 32.05, P<0.001, η2 = 0.11) and selfesteem (F = 54.68, P<0.001, η2 = 0.17) were significantly decreased compared to the pretest values. However, there was no significant difference between two groups in the depression mean scores (F = 2.33, P = 0.13). Regarding to the interaction between group and test
a significant change was seen in the mean score of all 4 variables including depression (F = 31.04, P<0.001, η2 = 0.10), anxiety (F = 14.21, P<0.001, η2 = 0.05), stress (F = 15.67, P<0.001, η2 = 0.06) and self-esteem (F = 13.29, P<0.001, η2 = 0.05). Furthermore, except depression (Δmean = -1.37, P<0.001), no significant difference was seen between study variables’ mean scores between post- and follow-up test (p>0.001). These results provide
preliminary approve for LSE to enhance emotional health and self-esteem in orphanages.
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