Prevention of Youth Involvement in Religious and Cult Organizations via the Online Space

Abstract

The results of an empirical study related to the problem of preventing the involvement of modern youth in religious and cult organizations through the Internet are presented in the article. An effective tool for preventing the involvement of young people in religious and cult organizations through the Internet space is a specially developed author's program aimed at developing critical thinking, skills to resist manipulation, increasing the level of self-esteem and harmonizing family relations - it is assumed in the research hypothesis. 30 young people included in the control and experimental groups, 15 people in each, acted as respondents. The study included two measurements carried out before and after the implementation of the author's program. The methodology used was "Exposure to manipulation", "Study of general self-esteem", "Critical thinking", "The psychological climate of the family." The effectiveness of the author's program was proved thanks to the comparative analysis of the experimental group before and after the corrective action and the comparative analysis of the experimental and control groups after the experiment.

Keywords

• involvement in religious organizations
• psychological characteristics of a young age
• critical thinking
• family relations
• level of self-esteem
• susceptibility to manipulation