Efficacy of Rational Emotive Therapy in Remediating Proneness to Violent Behaviour among Secondary School Students in Katsina State

Abstract

The study investigated the effectiveness of rational emotive therapy (RET) in remediating proneness to violent behaviour among secondary school students in Katsina state, Nigeria. It was guided by two research questions and two hypotheses. A pre-test post-test quasi-experimental design was employed in conducting the study using an adapted Violence Proneness Scale in collecting data, whose construct, content and face validities and a reliability index of 0.74 were documented. Also by using the Children Inventory of Anger, a sample of 120 participants were purposively targeted and exposed to a developed rational emotive counselling package. Paired sample t-test and an independent samples t-test were used to analyze the data generated. Findings revealed that rational emotive therapy is effective in remediating proneness to violent behaviour among the students and that though female students benefit the most, it was concluded that RET proved effective for both genders. Recommendation made was that the main conceptual and practical ideas of RET should be further exploited to particularly target the students through employing professionally trained personnel that can effectively and sufficiently utilize this type of counselling intervention.