Resumen de Reducing Social Anxiety among Adolescents in the Covid-19 Era: Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy as a Counselling Approach
Patrick Okoh Iyeke, Kehinde Clement Lawrence
While the prioritization and rollout of vaccines against COVID-19 in most countries of the world remains the only means to save the world from the novel coronavirus pandemic, which has continued to disrupt the traditional way of life for everyone, the increased social anxiety that can help to reduce vaccine hesitancy has been spared, especially in the developing nations. Therefore, this study aimed to adopt the Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) counselling approach to manage social anxiety among adolescents in the COVID-19 era. A quasi-experimental design (pre- post-test and control group) was adopted. Using the multistage sampling technique, 88 adolescents were randomly assigned to REBT (n= 43) and control groups n= 45). The results indicated that REBT significantly reduced social anxiety with pre-test and post-test mean scores of 47.56 (47.56%) ± 6.58 and 30.23 (30.23%) ±14.29, respectively. The main effect of REBT treatment was found to be significant (F 2, 233= 41.82, p= .000). Conversely, the two-way interaction between treatment and gender was not statistically significant. It was concluded that REBT is an effective counselling approach in reducing social anxiety among school-going adolescents, and that the treatment was not gender specific.
