An Intervention Program Cultivating Emotional Social Skills in Israeli Arab Adolescents
Sehrab Masri, Ihab Zubeidat, Waleed Dallasheh, Haggai Kupermintz
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Sehrab Masri
Sakhnin Academic College for Teacher Education, Sakhnin, Israel
Ihab Zubeidat
Sakhnin Academic College for Teacher Education, Sakhnin, Israel
Waleed Dallasheh
Sakhnin Academic College for Teacher Education, Sakhnin, Israel
Haggai Kupermintz
Faculty of Education, Haifa University, Haifa, Israel
Cite this paper as:Masri, S., Zubeidat, I., Dallasheh, W., Kupermintz, H. (2022). An Intervention Program Cultivating Emotional Social Skills in Israeli Arab Adolescents.
Journal of Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, 20(1), 209-224. https://doi.org/10.54808/JSCI.20.01.209
Online ISSN (Journal): 1690-4524
Abstract
Arab society in Israel is a traditional patriarchal culture holding collectivistic, interdependent values. Arabs in Israel receive basic human rights and privileges, but the Israeli society treats them as a separate minority group. The basic premise of the current study was that improving the emotional intelligence and the empathy abilities of adolescent Arabs in general – through a uni-national group program – would result in stronger empathy towards Jews in Israel – a change that would improve the Arab participant's attitudes and behaviors towards the Jews in Israel.
The research accompanying the implementation of the program was quasi-experimental. The main goals of the current intervention were to improve the intra-personal, interpersonal and inter-group skills and functioning, to strengthen awareness and skills in identifying and understanding emotions in themselves and other people – their causes and effects, to improve emotion regulation and ability to manage other people's emotions, to improve empathy towards members of the in-group (Arabs) and the out-group (Jews), to reduce stereotypes against minority groups, and to improve Jewish-Arab relations.
The sample included 172 Arab 10th and 11th grade adolescents in northern Israel. The main research hypotheses were: 1) The participants' emotional intelligence and empathy towards Arabs will be higher at the end of the program than at its beginning; 2) The participants' empathy towards Jews will be higher at the end of the program than at its beginning.
