Effectiveness of group cognitive-behavioral therapy on communicative skills and internet addiction of second grade high school students

The objective of the present study was to investigate the effectiveness of group cognitive-behavioral therapy on communicative skills and internet addiction of the students in the city of Isfahan.

The research method was quasi-experimental with pretest, posttest, control group and forty-five-day follow-up period. The research population included all forty second grade high school students in Isfahan high schools who featured the criteria to be included in the study and were selected through purposive sampling and randomly replaced into experimental and control groups (20 students in the experimental group and 20 in the control group). The applied instruments in the present study included internet addiction questionnaire (Yang, 1996), communicative skills questionnaire (Queen Dam, 2004). Then the experimental group received nine ninety-minute sessions of group cognitive-behavioral therapy interventions once a week during two-and-a-half months while the control group didn’t receive such interventions. Afterwards, the people in both groups took the posttest. The follow-up stage was administered after 45 days. After collecting questionnaires and extracting raw data, the data analysis from the study was conducted via SPSS23 software through descriptive statistics and repeated measurements ANOVA methods.

The results of the study showed that group cognitive-behavioral therapy has significant effect on internet addiction, communicative skills of the students at the posttest and follow-up stages (p<0.001).

According to the findings of the study it seems that through cognitive-behavioral therapy, the students’ internet addiction can be decreased and their communicative skills can be increased