Effect of cognitive restructuring counselling technique on social anxiety among secondary school students in Ilorin Metropolis, Kwara State, Nigeria

Abstract

Social anxiety has been recognized as one of the salient psychological problems among secondary school adolescents. Many of them lack  the confidence to demand for their rights and the ability to express their opinions without fear. This study thus examined the effect  of cognitive restructuring counselling technique on social anxiety among secondary school students in Ilorin metropolis, Kwara State,  Nigeria. The study adopted a quasi-experimental design which involved pre-test, post-test design. The population of the study comprised  three thousand, seven hundred and forty-seven secondary school students (3,747) who were identified with social anxiety in Ilorin  metropolis. The purposive sampling technique was used to select (10) socially anxious students that participated in the study. Social  Anxiety Scale (SAS) adopted from Yahaya and Nyarko-Sampson (2016) was used to collect relevant data for this study. Data were analysed  using mean, standard deviation, t-test and MANCOVA statistics. The findings of the study revealed that cognitive restructuring  counselling technique had effect on all the three components of social anxiety studied among secondary school students in Ilorin  metropolis that is: the physical component (t = 2.84; p < 0.05), the behavioural component (t = 3.24; p < 0.05) and the cognitive  component (t = 2.05; p < 0.05). The study unveiled that gender was not a significant factor for responses to treatment among the  participants of the study CRCT (f =0.563; p > 0.05). The study concluded that cognitive restructuring counselling technique was effective in  reducing social anxiety among secondary school students in Ilorin metropolis irrespective of its components and gender of participants.  Based on these findings, it was recommended among other things that, school counsellors/psychologists should make effective use of  cognitive restructuring counselling technique in addressing social anxiety among secondary school students.