Assessing the social effects of a therapeutic recreation summer camp for adolescents withi chronic illness

This study assessed the social effects of a therapeutic recreation summer camp for adolescents with chronic illness. Over two million adolescents in the United States have some form of a chronic illness and frequently have decreased levels of social self-efficacy and social performance. Social self-efficacy is the belief that an individual can successfully perform a given social task or social behavior. Both the summer camp industry and the field of therapeutic recreation have been found to help increase social self-efficacy and social performance among adolescents with chronic illness. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a therapeutic recreation based summer camp on social self-efficacy levels and social performance with peers among adolescents with chronic illness. Seventy-nine campers, ages 11 to 22, participated in two different sessions of summer camp for adolescents with chronic illness. All participants were currently diagnosed with Neurofibromatosis, a specific form of chronic illness. Campers were assigned to attend 1 of 2 weeks of summer camp at Camp Kostopulos in Salt Lake City, Utah. The first week followed the traditional Camp K Model and the second followed the therapeutic recreation process (assessments, planning, implementation, evaluation, and documentation). The Social Self-Efficacy scale was used to measure social self-efficacy at the beginning and end of each week of camp. An adapted version of the Social Skills Questionnaire was used daily to measure social performance. Controlling for pretest levels, an ANCOVA was used to compare the results from the Social Self-Efficacy scale week 1 with the results from the Social Self-Efficacy scale week 2. Alpha was set at .05. Repeated measures ANCOVA was used to compare the results of the social performance scores gathered from the Social Skills Questionnaire. The day 1 pretest was used as a covariate. The first hypothesis was that summer camp programs utilizing therapeutic recreation programming to increase social self-efficacy among adolescents with chronic illness will be more effective at increasing social self-efficacy than summer camp programs not utilizing therapeutic recreation. This hypothesis was not supported. The second hypothesis was that participants in the therapeutic recreation based summer camp session would exhibit a greater increase in social performance with peers over the traditional summer camp session. The second hypothesis was supported by statistical analysis.