Effectiveness of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy on Subjective Well-being of Mothers with Child Bereavement Experience

This study aimed to determine the effectiveness of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) on the subjective well-being of mothers with the experience of child bereavement in Fereydunkenar County. The research method was quasi-experimental with a pre-test–post-test control group design. The statistical population consisted of 95 women aged 30 to 60 with child bereavement experience who were members of a self-help group in Fereydunkenar County in Spring 2024. Initially, the Grief Experience Questionnaire by Barrett and Scott (1998) was distributed among the entire target population. Then, 30 individuals with moderate grief experience (scores between 68 and 102) were purposively and conveniently selected and randomly assigned to experimental (n = 15) and control (n = 15) groups. Data were collected using the Subjective Well-being Scale by Keyes and Magyar-Moe (2003) and the Grief Experience Questionnaire by Barrett and Scott (1998). The intervention for the experimental group was based on the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy protocol by Hayes et al. (2004), conducted over eight 60-minute sessions. The intervention was applied only to the experimental group, and no intervention was provided for the control group. Data were analyzed using univariate and multivariate analysis of covariance. The findings indicated that there was a significant difference at the 0.01 level between the pre-test and post-test scores of the experimental and control groups in the subjective well-being of mothers with child bereavement experience in Fereydunkenar County. Overall, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy was effective on the subjective well-being of mothers with child bereavement experience in Fereydunkenar County. Given the results of this study, attention to the role of ACT in creating changes in subjective well-being has important therapeutic implications.