2023 Volume 76 Issue 2 Pages e28-e36
The Animal Welfare Center in X Prefecture has been supporting children refusing to go to school using animal assisted therapy as a “safe place”. As the intervention sessions progressed, there were changes in the spontaneous behavior of the children who are staying at home such as children refusing to go to school and hikikomori. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of animal assisted therapy, we calculated the size of the effect using the visually observed behavior of children as an index. Based on the interpretive criteria of the percentage of non-overlapping data (PND) which is an effect index in the statistical analysis of single-case experimental designs, the evaluation showed that there were effective changes in 20 of the 27 subjects. The size of the effect tended to be larger when the child and animal had a mutually beneficial relationship and when the child performed useful tasks for the animal.
