THE EFFECTS OF ACCEPTANCE AND COMMITMENT THERAPY ON MEANING IN LIFE AMONG FIRST-YEAR UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

Abstract

The objective of this research is to explore the effects of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) on meaning in life (MIL) among first-year university students. The research design was a pre-test post-test quasi-experiment with a control group. The research sample included 20 first-year university students from Srinakharinwirot University who had MIL scores below the 60th percentile. The 20 participants were partially randomly assigned into the ACT experimental group and the waitlist control group, with 10 participants in each group. The research instruments were the Tripartite Meaning in Life Scale (TMLS) and the online group ACT program. The data were analyzed using the paired samples t-test and the independent samples t-test. The results were as follows: (1) the first-year university students who participated in ACT had higher scores on MIL than before participating in ACT at a statistically significant level of p<.001, with an effect size of 2.43, and (2) the first-year university students who participated in ACT had higher scores on MIL than those in the control group who did not participate in ACT at a statistically significant level of p<.0025, with an effect size of 1.50.

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