The Efficacy of a Holding Community Program—Promoting Social Reflection at School

Abstract

The authors developed a Holding Community Program to achieve the following objectives: (a) to increase the perspective-taking capacity of adolescents; (b) to promote interpersonal and intergroup harmony; (c) to empower school students to be more (pro)active in their communities and in public life. Apart from the intervention itself, the study comprised a pre-test and a post-test and involved a total of 240 Hungarian high school students (159 female, 66.3%). The students were aged 14–18 (Mage = 15.33; S Dage = 0.88). They were recruited from four high schools. Control groups (N = 122) were chosen from the same institution and graded as experimental classes (N = 118, 7 classes). Both immediate and long-term effects of the intervention (4–6 months after the intervention) were explored. Quantitative analysis of the data indicated that the two-day intervention program had significantly increased the students’ perspective-taking capacity (short-term: F(1, 238) = 6.03, p < 0.05, long-term: n.s.) and efficacy beliefs (short-term: F(1, 238) = 3.83, p = 0.052, long-term: F(1, 238) = 3.38, p < 0.05). After the training, students were more willing to participate in collective actions (short-term: F(1, 238) = 7.32, p < 0.01, long-term: F(1, 238) = 3.83, p < 0.05). These results seem quite promising but the outcome was not significant regarding its effect on prejudice.