Sociable in Someone Else’s Shoes: A Review of Drama as Social Skills Training for Elementary School Children

Abstract

The Dutch Central Government wants to focus on preventing mental health issues and the educational system needs to play a role in that process. Research has already shown that art therapy has significant positive results on mental wellbeing, so the question was asked whether arts in the education could help relief mental health stress of children. Specific attention for the effects of drama on social skills of children is justified, because higher social skills are associated with lower psychosocial stress, which in turn seems to be related to improved mental health. This study is a meta-analysis on current research, which was then compared to older meta-analyses on the same topic. Results are promising and consistent with earlier meta-analyses. The average effect size of the current research was found to be 1.174 in current research, but more empirical research on the relationship between drama and social skills is needed to warrant a decisive conclusion.