The Making Friends Program: Impact on Social Acceptance in Inclusive Preschool Settings

This research aimed to determine whether the Making Friends (MF) program is effective on social acceptance levels of typically developing children in preschool toward their peers with special needs. The research had an experimental design with a control group, pretest, posttest, and follow-up test. The study included 130 typically developing children in inclusive classrooms in educational institutions in Edirne, Turkey; 64 of whom were in the experimental group and 66 of whom were in the control group. In the current study, the MF program was applied to the children in the experimental group as 3 days a week for 6 weeks. General Information Form and Acceptance Scale for Kindergarten were used as data collection tools. The data were analyzed using the Covariance Analysis in the context of Generalized Linear Models (ANCOVA). The MF program was found to be effective on increasing social acceptance levels of typically developing children in inclusive preschool settings.