Effect of Assertiveness Technique in Reducing Verbal Victimization among Junior Secondary School Students in Anambra State

Aims: The purpose of this study is to determine the effect of assertiveness technique in reducing verbal victimization among junior secondary school students in Anambra state.

Study Design: The design adopted for this study is pure experimental design.

Place and Duration of Study: The target population is 1182 junior secondary students identified to be verbally victimized. The duration is between January 2021 and June 2021.

Methodology: The design adopted for this study is the pure experimental. Two secondary schools where adopted for the study, from the two secondary schools, one group served as treatment/experimental group and the other school served as control group with participants randomly assigned. These participants were identified by administering a structured questionnaire structured by the researchers. The population for the study comprised 1182 junior secondary students identified to be verbally victimized. The sample was drawn using the purposive sampling technique, this was to identify schools with students that are verbally victimized. A total of 104 students (54 male and 50 female) were drawn and randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups as sample for the study. The instrument for data collection was the bullying victimization scale (BVS), the scale was developed and validated based on Elvis (1996) questionnaire and normalized for Nigerian cultural situation. Data collected for this study were organized in table and were analyzed. Data relating to the answering of research questions were analyzed using the mean. While the data relating to the testing of hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance was analyzed using Analysis of co-variance (ANCOVA).

Results: At 0.05 level of significance, the analysis of the data collected revealed that the experimental group had a mean gain difference of 3.29 over the control group, the result further revealed that male students had a mean gain difference of 21.54 over the female students. This indicates that assertiveness technique was more effective on male junior secondary school students than their female counterparts. The findings revealed there was no difference in the mean post test scores of students who received treatment using assertiveness technique and those in the control group (p = 0.416, 0.05). also there was a significant difference in the mean post test scores of male and female secondary school students (p=0.026, 0.05).

Conclusion: Through the findings that emerged from the study, it is concluded that the assertiveness technique is effective in reducing verbal victimization among junior secondary school students in Anambra state. Hence, counsellors in secondary schools should adopt assertiveness counselling techniques during counselling sessions to reduce the increased rate of verbal victimization in schools.