Abstract
This study is based on an experimental design by making a comparison between control group and experimental group based on the pre- and post-test results. The objective is to identify the effect of sandtray therapy towards the improvement of the five self-esteem variables: general, social, family, academic and lie. The subjects of the study were children aged 11 years old (n = 32) in Malaysia. They were divided into two groups namely the sandtray group (n = 16) as the experimental group, who received sandtray therapy compared to control group (n = 16) who did not receive the treatment. The data were analysed using SPSS version 22, MANOVA recurrent measurement, pre-test and post-test. The findings specify that sandtray therapy is a valuable therapeutic intervention to enhance the child’s self-esteem. Several recommendations were presented to parents, teachers and school administrators, and the Ministry of Education Malaysia was discussed in promoting children’s well-being. Keywords: Sandtray therapy, group counselling, children, self-esteem
Highlights
Counselling in schools has been seen to have a significant impact on children’s mental well-being (McLaughlin and Holiday, 2014)
The results towards the social self-esteem shows F(1,15) = 63.646 α < 0.05, to the parental self-esteem F(1,15) = 82.924 α < 0.05, to the academic self-esteem F(1,15) = 80.071 α < 0.05 and to lie self-esteem F(1,15) = 0.732 α > 0.05. This indicates that sandtray therapy gives significant effect to four of the self-esteem variables in pre-test and post-test of the experimental group, except for lie self-esteem
Pillai’s trace shows overall statistically significant effects of sandtray therapy towards the self-esteem variables, when it comes to the univariate test, to each self-esteem variables, it shows that all except lie self-esteem are significantly affected by the use of sandtray therapy
Summary
Counselling in schools has been seen to have a significant impact on children’s mental well-being (McLaughlin and Holiday, 2014). Homeyer and Sweeney (2011) stated that children do not communicate in the same way that adults do because children do not have the cognitive or verbal maturity to communicate in counselling in the way as adults’ converse. Counsellors face difficulty in carrying out counselling sessions with children as children face difficulties in expressing their emotions verbally, will tend to be silent and will try to avoid touching important issues during conventional counselling (Geldard & Geldard, 2002). The sandtray therapy approach is an effective counselling approach for children and able to form therapeutic relationships between children and counsellors through the natural language of children playing (Landreth, 2012). Children choose miniatures from a collection and build scenes in the sandtray as an expression and representation of their inner worlds (Homeyer & Sweeney, 2011)
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