EFFICACY OF PEER GROUP COUNSELLING IN ENHANCING THE SELF-CONCEPT OF SECONDARY SCHOOL ADOLESCENTS IN BENIN CITY

ABSTRACT
The study investigated the efficacy of peer group counselling in enhancing the self concept of secondary school adolescents in Benin City. The influence of sex (2 levels), school type (3 levels) and family type (2 levels) on the self concept of these adolescents was also investigated.
The design of the study is experimental. A pretest-posttest control group design was employed for the study. Sixty-eight (68) senior secondary school II students of three public secondary schools in Benin City – a boys’ school, a girls’ school and a co-educational school – were the participants of the study. The adolescents participated in peer counselling in groups. A 40-item adolescent self-concept scale adapted from Akinboye (1977), Adolescent Personal Data Inventory (APDI) was the instrument used to measure the self-concept of the participants. The content validity of the instrument was established by guidance and counselling experts and the test-retest reliability method was used to assess the reliability of the instrument. A correlation coefficient r = 0.67 was obtained. Seven null hypotheses were formulated for the study and tested at 0.05 level of significance.
Data collected were analysed using t-test and analysis of variance (ANOVA). Results indicated that peer group counselling had a significant positive effect on the self-concept of the adolescents involved in the study. The mean self-concept score for the peer counselling group (X = 164.71) was significantly higher than that of the control group (X = 132.82) at p < 0.05. School type was also found to have a significant influence on the self-concept of the adolescents, girls in the single-sex school had significantly higher self-concept than girls in the co-educational school. The mean difference of 20.65 between the two groups was found to be significant at p < 0.05. Sex and family type had no significant influence on the self-concept of the adolescents. There was a significant interactive effect of peer group counselling and school type on the self-concept of the adolescents. This interaction was ordinal in nature.
The integration of peer group counselling into the regular school-counselling programme was recommended. It was suggested that further research on the effects of peer group counselling on other psychological constructs as well as studies of longer duration than the present one (which involved ten sessions of peer group counselling encounter) be carried out to ascertain the effects of peer group counselling over time. It was also suggested that research on the effects of peer group counselling an adolescents, involving the variables of school location, educational qualification of parents, age and family type, in terms of monogamy and polygamy, be carried out in the future.