A Study on the Effects of Enneagram-Based Programs on Stress Reduction and Coping

The purpose of this study is to examine, through meta-analysis, the effects of Enneagram-based programs on stress reduction and coping in Korea. Following the PICOS criteria, eight domestic journal articles and degree papers using a pretest-posttest control group design were selected, and seven were used for the main analysis after excluding one extreme outlier. Since active and passive coping operate in opposite directions, the outcome domains were divided into stress level, active coping, and passive coping. The results are as follows. First, the effect size for stress level was 0.874 and significant under the DerSimonian-Laird estimator, active coping showed 0.723 without reaching significance, and passive coping showed -0.511, consistently negative across the three studies. However, the significance of all three domains was not robust to the estimation method, and the findings are interpreted as tentative tendencies. Second, in all three studies the effect size for active coping was larger than that for passive coping, showing a consistent direction. Because passive coping was reverse-coded, the negative value indicates that wishful thinking and emotion-focused coping increased after the program. These results suggest that Enneagram-based programs show a tendency to alleviate stress levels but may bring about unintended changes in passive coping, and will serve as meaningful data for the design of such programs.