Active Games for Increasing Social and Emotional Competencies of Young Adults in Probation System: a One-Sample Trial Study in Izmir City in Turkiye

Overview

Objective: The goal of this one-sample clinical trial is to implement active games, including physical activities, that support the social and emotional competencies of individuals in probation sentence. Methods: The study was carried out with 50 young adult offenders. The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) model, which defines five social and emotional skills (self-awareness, self-management, responsible decision making, relationship skills, social awareness), was used to support observation and game design. The present study involved the codesign of a total of 18 active games to develop these five competencies. The primary outcomes of the research were increased mental well-being and increased social emotional skills in participants receiving the AG4C program. The secondary outcome of the research was the regular participation of the participants in the program. In this study, two hypotheses were tested: "The ActiveGames4Change programme increases the psychological wellbeing of young adults on probation" and "The ActiveGames4Change programme increases the 5 basic skills of young adults on probation. This study was carried out with 50 young adult offender individuals (48 male and 2 female) who received probation measures in accordance with the court or prosecutor's decision for different crimes. The CASEL model, which defines social and emotional skills, was used to support observation and game design because it determines the characteristics of young people who are in the execution process. The skill set proposed by the CASEL model included skills such as "self-awareness", "self-management", "social awareness", "relationship skills" and "responsible decision-making". The Wilcoxon signed-rank test was employed to examine the impact of the intervention on participants' progression of competency levels before and after the intervention.

This work involved the codesign of 18 active games to develop five core competencies. Each game was designed with three levels: Level 1 games require less complex social and emotional competencies; Level 2 acts as a bridge to cement and develop those established in Level 1; and Level 3 requires either more competencies or competencies used at a higher level of difficulty. Nine of them were applied to 38 participants during 4 sessions at different times in the present study between 14/12/2021 and 09/02/2022. Nine of the 18 games could not be played due to the limitations of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was carried out by 10 trainers with 50 (including 12 dropouts) young individuals at the Izmir Probation Directorate in Turkiye. Since the current physical conditions of the institution were not suitable, a full-fledged sports hall affiliated with the municipality was implemented as a result of cooperation with a local governmental institution. The Turkish version of the Warwick-Edinburgh Well-being Scale (WEMWBS) was used by the participants before and at the end of the AG4C Program, which evaluated the five SECs mentioned above. All measurements were obtained by asking the participant by the instructor/educator or researcher instead of self-reporting. Thus, the biases caused by the participants were minimized by ensuring that the participants perceived the questions correctly. Eighteen games were designed within the CASEL framework, and each game had three levels, which means that there were six games at each level. The game cards were developed, which included instructions about how to implement the game for educators and learners (probationers). All games were also available on the specially designed AG4C App (www.activegames4change.org/ag4c-app.html), where progress data could also be captured. After the games were designed, 10 educators in a probation service were trained by two master trainers to enable them to test the games program with young people as well as to gather both pre- and post-intervention data. Additionally, the educators (n=10) conducted evaluations of the games that they had implemented for the participants. A comprehensive training package was provided to the educators of the Izmir Probation Directorate. The package consisted of 18 games and online theoretical and practical training with video tutorials. The games were collaboratively developed in English by experts through expert panels and 2 validation workshops, all of which involved AG4C project partners, before they were adapted for usage. Subsequently, the researcher translated all the materials from English into Turkish in preparation for use in the pilot program in Turkiye.