Reducing Social Anxiety among Adolescents in the Covid-19 Era: Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy as a Counselling Approach

ABSTRACT

While the prioritization and rollout of vaccines against COVID-19 in most countries of the worldremains the only means to save the world from the novel coronavirus pandemic, which has continuedto disrupt the traditional way of life for everyone, the increased social anxiety that can help to reducevaccine hesitancy has been spared, especially in the developing nations. Therefore, this study aimedto adopt the Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) counselling approach to manage socialanxiety among adolescents in the COVID-19 era. A quasi-experimental design (pre- post-test andcontrol group) was adopted. Using the multistage sampling technique, 88 adolescents were randomlyassigned to REBT (n= 43) and control groups n= 45). The results indicated that REBT significantlyreduced 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 (F2, 233= 41.82, p= .000). Conversely, the two-way interaction between treatment and gender was notstatistically significant. It was concluded that REBT is an effective counselling approach in reducingsocial anxiety among school-going adolescents, and that the treatment was not gender specific (AU)