글쓰기문학치료가 대학생의 불안과 자아정체감에 미치는 영향 연구

초록

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of poetry/journal therapy on anxiety and ego identity of university students. Faced with the transition from adolescence to adulthood, university students often go through the so-called quarterlife crisis. They may suffer from various psychological issues such as anxiety, depression, stress, and confusion in ego identity. Poetry/journal therapy is an interactive therapeutic process that is guided by a facilitator, in which participants can be helped to experience change, growth, and healing. This is achieved by facilitating the participants to express their emotional responses to catalytic literary texts and to write their feelings using various techniques belonging to journal therapy and expressive writing. Through this process, poetry/journal therapy enables participants to resolve various psychological issues and gain health-promoting benefits in various aspects of their life. Data for the study were collected from 19 university students who were divided into two groups. The experimental group consisted of 9 students, whereas the control group had 10. The program was composed of 10 sessions of 75 minutes. To obtain a more thorough result, both quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted. For the study’s quantitative analysis, the STAI (State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, Kim J. T, 1978) and the KAES (Korean Adolescent Ego-identity Scale, Park, A, 2003) were used. The results of the study are as follows. First, poetry/journal therapy has statistically significant effects on reducing the level of anxiety. The participants in the experimental group show significantly lower levels of both state and trait anxiety than those in the control group. Second, poetry/journal therapy positively affects the improvement of the participants’ ego identity. Third, the participants demonstrate a reduced level of anxiety and a greater level of positiveness and initiative in their ego identity-related attitudes and behaviors after the completion of the program. In conclusion, this study is meaningful because it demonstrated that poetry/journal therapy positively affects the reduction of the anxiety level of university students and the improvement of their ego identity. Additionally, university students, who are indispensable and invaluable human resources of the future society, are presently undergoing a critical psychological crisis. Within such a context, this study provides a meaningful basis for further studies that seek to verify whether poetry/journal therapy can help university students cope with other psychological issues. Furthermore, this study contributes toward confirming that the active financial and systematic support by the government and related organizations is urgently needed, in order to implement poetry/journal therapy programs as a crucial part of counselling and therapy for university students.

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