Fostering resilience among children: a life skills intervention

The promotion of Child Mental Health can lead to prevention of mental illness. 'Life Skills Education is a proven method for promoting mental health. This indicates that life skills education is required by young people for their holistic development and hence it should be imparted. Well designed, tested and delivered life skills programmes can achieve much in helping children and adolescents become more responsible, healthy and resilient both during childhood and as adults. The concept of resilience emerged in the psychiatric literature in the 1980's, in an attempt to understand individual differences in their responses to stress and adversity, which has a direct linkage with wellbeing. Resilience and Life Skills Training are topics of interests to school psychologists, yet little is known about the relationships among the two. It was hypothesized that resilience would mediate the relationship with Life Skills. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of Life Skills Training for fostering Resilience. The training was conducted over a period of 30 days for 60 min per day. A total of 15 students participated in the training programe. Wagnild and Young's Resilience Scale was utilized for assessing the resilience before and after the training programme. The result of the training indicates a positive effect on life skills training for fostering resilience. The statistical analysis also indicates that there is an improvement in the level of resilience on the experimental group

Occupational burnout in a sample of geriatric social care professionals in Malaysia

This study examined the relationship between occupational burnout and various socio-demographic variables, workload and job clarity in a sample of geriatric social care workers in Malaysia. Maslach’s Burnout Inventory was used to categorise occupational burnout into three categories: state of emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation and reduced personal accomplishment.The results showed significant gender and marital status differences in depersonalisation. In addition, the results showed that participants with poor job clarity and those who perceived they had a heavy workload were more emotionally exhausted. These results are discussed in terms of the job stresses faced by welfare workers in Malaysia

The role of family life and the influence of peer pressure on delinquency: Qualitative evidence from Malaysia

Juvenile delinquency is always seen as a public health problem which needs intervention at various levels. Identifying which factors may lead juveniles to delinquency is a long-standing question among criminologists. This remains the case in Malaysia. There are studies that have explored the impact of problem-solving skills, low socioeconomic status, and gender differences in predicting the delinquent behavior of youth in Malaysia. However, very few studies have aimed to find an in-depth understanding of the effects of family roles and peer pressure on delinquency in Malaysia. The present qualitative research was designed to fill this gap in the literature. In-depth interviews were conducted with 12 young male prisoners (juvenile delinquents) in Malaysia to explore the influences of family life and peer pressure on delinquency. The current study showed that parental un-involvement, parent separation, peer pressure, criminal gang membership, and parents’ involvement in crime were the important factors for involvement in delinquency. The findings revealed the importance of guidance and counseling for parents and adolescents, to help them cope with life challenges and to build their social and emotional skills, as well as the necessity of appointing school psychologists and public health experts to help the youths become valuable individuals