Nonviolence Communication to Reduce Stress, Anxiety and Depression in Young Iranian Women: A Randomized Experiment

Abstract

Stress is one of the important dimensions of social communication that directly and indirectly affect anxiety management or depression. In the meantime, adolescents and especially girls are more likely to be harmed in poor and vulnerable communities. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of group training with non-violence communication (NVC) method on stress, anxiety and depression of young girls. The target community in this research was 50 participants that were randomly selected from the charity centers of Tehran suburbs. Participants were randomly divided and placed equally into the experimental and control groups. The study entry criteria were students aged from 11 to 18 years, the vulnerable socio-economic income and the stress cut off point as 12. Eight training sessions of NVC were presented for the experimental group between the pre-test and post-test intervals, while no intervention was performed for the control group. Data collection instruments were depression, anxiety and stress scale (Dass-21) and participants were followed up after 1 month. After statistical analysis, the effectiveness of the training was investigated through analysis of repeated major variance. Eventually, the results showed a significant difference between the experimental and control groups (p < .001). The findings of the study showed that NVC training reduces stress and anxiety levels, but it did not affect depression in young girls who are vulnerable socially and economically.