Effectiveness of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Remediating Violent Secondary School Students in KATSINA STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

The study was motivated by the kinds and types of violent behaviours being exhibited by students and the relentless quest for solutions to such problems. Thus, it analyzed the effectiveness of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) in remediating violent behaviour among secondary school students in Katsina state. The research design employed was pre-test post-test quasi-experimental classification with three levels of treatment. A sample size of 360 subjects was purposively drawn from a population of 102, 778 students from secondary schools in Katsina State Ministry 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 effects of CBT and REBT interventions in remediating violent behaviour among all students with REBT emerging as the best option. One of the counseling implications of this study is that counsellors should use office disciplinary data to guide interventions, because those data can show the frequency of violent behaviours, the locations of problems, the types of violent problems, the students involved, and the staff members who are making referrals. One of the recommendations offered was, that Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy should be best utilized in remediating violent behaviours among both male and female students, as it has proven most efficient over cognitive behaviour therapy