A Study on Effect of Forest Education Program for Juvenile Probationers

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study was performed to analyze the effect of forest education on juvenile probationers’psychological and emotional changes. Changes of resilience, mood state and attitudes toward forest of 272 juvenile probationers, who attended forest education program co-managed by Korea Forest Service and Ministry of Justice in 2016, were identified by self-report survey. Survey analysis was performed using descriptive statistics, reliability analysis, exploratory factor analysis and paired t-test with IBM SPSS 21.0 program. The forest education program consisted of physical activity, emotional activity, cognitive activity, challenging activity and problem solving activity (e.g. physical exercises in the forest, forest meditation, observing forest with mirror, talking with trees, creating with natural objects, etc.). The result was as follows: First, it showed that program using forest education activities for juvenile probationers has an effect on the development of resilience. Second, it showed that program using forest education activities for juvenile probationers had an effect on the improvement of mood state. Third, it showed that program using forest education activities for juvenile probationers had an effect on the development of attitudes toward forest. It showed that program using forest education activities for juvenile probationers had an effect on the development of enjoying the forest and importance and usefulness of forest by sub-factors of attitudes toward forest. Therefore the result came out that forest education program had influence on positive change of juvenile probationers’ resilience, mood state and increase of attitude towards forest. This study had a limitation to generalize the result of the study for the limited case, but forest education was expected to help the social adaptation and development of the at-risk youth who was exposed to the current risk. The next study need for various experts’cooperation to develop customized forest education programs for juvenile probationers and continuous monitoring of the effect.