Parental Socio-Demographic Factors and Psychological Adjustment of Senior Secondary School Students in Rivers State, Nigeria

The study investigated parental socio-demographic factors and psychological adjustment among senior secondary school students in Rivers State, Nigeria. Three research questions and three corresponding hypotheses guided the study. Ex-post factor research design was adopted in the study. The population of the study comprised all the 30,528 senior secondary school II (SS II) students in the 261 senior secondary schools in Rivers State, Nigeria. The sample for the study comprised 3,052 SS II students determined through the simple random sampling technique, using 10% of the population. Data were collected using the researcher’s constructed non-cognitive instrument of two sections titled ‘students’ Psychological Adjustment Questionnaire†(SPAQ) which was validated by experts in the area of Educational psychology and Measurement and Evaluation, University of Port Harcourt. Cronbach alpha method was used to establish the reliability of the instrument which yielded a value of.70. Data collected were analyzed using mean and standard deviation to answer the research questions while one-way ANOVA was used to test the null hypotheses at .05 level of significance. The result revealed that low income and low educational level of parents affect students’ psychological adjustment negatively. It was therefore recommended among others that government and non-governmental organizations should frequent schools in order to give scholarship to students of low parental income status in order to boost their psychological well being.