EFFECTIVENESS OF RATIONAL EMOTIVE BEHAVIOUR THERAPY IN REDUCING AGGRESSION AMONG SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS IN KATSINA ZONAL DIRECTORATE OF EDUCATION

Abstract

The study is a quasi-experiment on the effectiveness of Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy (REBT) in reducing aggression among senior secondary school students in Katsina Zonal Directorate of Education. The research design employed was the pre-test post test two-factor classification with one level of treatment. A sample size of 120 subjects was purposively drawn from a population of 27, 057 students from five schools in Katsina Zonal Directorate of Education. The instrument used for data collection was an adapted version of the Violence Proneness Scale (VPS) developed by Tarter, Kirisci, Vanyukov, Cornelius, Pajer, Shoal, and Giancola, (2002). With the use of paired samples t-test, results revealed that there is significant difference in the effect of REBT intervention in reducing aggression among all students. Among the recommendations offered was that professional Counsellors who work especially with secondary school students should take cognizance of the fact that students may be particularly vulnerable to the negative impact of aggression that stems from a variety of sources. This will assist the Counsellors to develop further the intervention strategy which has proven very effective to help students cope with potentially overwhelming behavioural requirements.