Abstract

Smartphone usage problems contribute negative impacts on students’ physical and psychological development. Thus, the present study attempted to determine the effectiveness of CBT group counseling with a cognitive restructuring technique to reduce students’ smartphone usage problems through a randomized pretest-posttest control group design. This intervention was given to the experimental group, while the control group received the conventional counseling. Further, students’ data were collected using a smartphone addiction scale (SAS) whose reliability was 0.95 and was adapted using scientific procedures. Once the data collected, Wilcoxon signed rank and Mann-Whitney U tests were carried out. Findings showed that the CBT group counseling with a cognitive restructuring technique implemented gained more effective than that of conventional in the control group. Based on this finding, this study contributes to the improvement of a guidance and counseling service quality in terms of the use of CBT group counseling with a cognitive restructuring technique to reduce students’ smartphone usage problems