EFFECTIVENESS OF LIFE SKILLS TRAINING PROGRAM TO ENHANCE MENTAL HEALTH STATUS AND WELL BEING OF YOUNG PEOPLE, AN INTERVENTION STUDY

The aim of the study is to assess the effectiveness of a life skills training program to enhance mental health status and well being of young people. A classical experimental research design with a control group (pre, post, and follow-up intervention) and random sampling method were used. The present study comprised girls and boys in the age group of 16 to 19yrs, studying in plus one and plus two classes from Ernakulum Educational District of Kerala. The respondents were selected on the basis of inclusion and exclusion criteria and also evaluated the mental health status by GHQ-28 and mental well being by WEMWS-14. The 720 respondents from six Higher Secondary Schools (3 Govt. schools and 3 Pvt. Schools:1 boys, 1girls and 1co-edu. schools) were randomly selected and distributed in two mentioned groups such as 360 students in intervention group and 360 students in control group (180 boys and 180 girls from each group). The researcher conducted life skills training program (10 – 12 sessions in five weeks) to the intervention group and again the same assessment tools were administered for post-intervention (one – three months) and follow -up intervention (six- nine months) to evaluate the effectiveness of intervention program to enhance mental health status and well being of the respondents. The current version of the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) was used to analyze the data and correlations were obtained. Repeated Measures Analysis of Variance (RMANOVA) was performed to test whether there is any significant effect due to interventions in the scores. Independent sample t-test was performed to compare the equality of baseline scores of various components of the mental health status and well being of the two groups. The data were analyzed by descriptive and inferential statistics in three-time lines (pre, post and follow- up intervention) under different sections. The result shows that there was a highly significant intervention effect between the scores of mental health status and well being. The researcher has noticed that a tremendous number (100% in mental health status and 99.1% in mental well being) of respondents in each group were benefitted by the intervention program. This indicates the need for periodic and constant intervention for the respondents. Hence, it can be concluded that life skills training program is effective for enhancing mental health status and well being of young people.