Equine Facilitated Therapy with Children and Adolescents Who Have Been Sexually Abused: A Program Evaluation Study

Equine Facilitated Therapy with Children and Adolescents Who Have Been Sexually Abused: A Program Evaluation Study

Article Critique

Child sexual abuse is considered to be a social issue that affects children and adolescent with behavioral problems and psychological trauma. Equine Facilitated Therapy with Children and Adolescents Who Have Been Sexually Abused: A Program Evaluation Study was conducted by Kathleen Keep, Kathy Prentice, Nik Taylor, Helena Botros and Tania Signal, which was published online on 2013. This study was a quantitative study that was conducted for the purpose of evaluation of effectiveness of Equine Facilitated Therapy Program (EFT) that was running by Phoenix House. Phoenix House is a referral centre for sexual assault in Queensland, Australia. The study was conducted on participants consisting of nine girls and six boys (between 8 and 11 years of age) and 15 adolescent girls (between 12 and 17 years of age).

The research question was to find out the effectiveness of Equine Facilitated Program that was carried through the use of Trauma Symptom Checklist that included 54 items of questionnaire. It was designed to evaluate the post trauma symptom in adolescents and children. The researchers have used the hypothesis whether Equine Facilitated Program is effective in the treatment of individuals who are going through the psychological trauma or not.

The sample was gathered from the participants including to carry out the study through the use of questionnaire. The sample was collected through the use of Trauma Symptom Checklist (TSCC), Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI). Trauma Symptom Checklist was consisted of questionnaire of 54 items by using Australian normative sample. TSCC was scored on a Likert scale of four points where high score was depicted as higher condition of trauma symptom. ...