The Effectiveness of Social Cognitive Skills on the Motivational Structure of Students with a Propensity to Engage in Risky Behavior

The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of social cognitive skills on the motivational structure of students with a tendency toward risky behavior. The research method was applied in terms of purpose and the design of the present research was quasi-experimental with pretest-posttest and follow-up with a control group. The statistical population consisted of female second-year secondary school students in the 7th district of Tehran in the academic year 2017-2018, of which 24 female students were selected based on the cut-off of Iranian Adolescents Risk-Taking Scale (IARTS) and randomly assigned to the control and experimental groups. Both groups answered the Personal Concerns Inventory (PCI) before the test, after the test, and at follow-up. After 12 sessions of social cognitive skills training, the present data were analyzed using analysis of variance with mixed design and SPSS-24 software. In the present study, the interaction effect of time*group for the components of inclination (P=0.001, F=11.03), control (P=0.006, F=5.70), information (P=0.008, F=5.41), effort (P=0.002, F=7.55), satisfaction (P =0.001, F=11.03), and engagement (P=0.002, F=6.91) was significant at the 0.05 level. Cognitive-social skills training improved the motivational structure of students with risky behaviors. Therefore, it is suggested that students and teachers should be taught cognitive-social skills to improve students’ adaptive motivational structure.