Psychosocial Interventions and Posttraumatic Growth: A Meta-Analysis

Objective: People commonly report growth after adversity. Can psychosocial intervention facilitate posttraumatic growth (PTG)? Method: This meta-analysis assesses the relationship between intervention participation and PTG using published and unpublished reports located with the database PsycINFO. Eligible studies included randomized controlled trials (k = 12) that provided a psychosocial intervention to people who had experienced an identifiable hardship or trauma (N = 1,171). None of these interventions were specifically designed to promote PTG as a primary outcome. Results: The overall controlled effect size (Hedges's g) of 0.36 (95% CI [0.23, 0.48]), using a fixed effects model, suggests that current interventions modestly increase PTG. Moderation analyses revealed little about the factors that increase interventions' effect on PTG, indicating only that interventions that administered the posttest soon after treatment tended to show larger effect sizes. Conclusions: Overall, these estimates may be unreliable due to the small number of eligible studies and the varied types of interventions tested, but they suggest that active intervention can help people make the most of adversity.