ABSTRACT

This study investigated how adolescent-parent conflict correlates with the self-esteem and academic performance of senior secondary school students in Umuahia Education Zone. The design of the study was correlational survey design. Seven research questions and four hypotheses guided the study. The population of the study comprised four thousand and two senior secondary school students in SS1 and SS2. Two hundred male and two hundred female adolescent students were selected using simple random sampling which made up the sample size for the study. The three instruments for data collection were Adolescent-parent Conflict Questionnaire (APCQ), Self-Esteem Questionnaire (SEQ) and the respondents’ Junior Secondary School Examination Scores. The questionnaires were faces and contents validated by giving the initial copies to the supervisor and three experts in Psychology, Counselling and Measurement and Evaluation, Micheal Okpara University of Agriculture Umudike. Reliability was established by test retest method which yielded a coefficient index of 0.81. Copies of the questionnaires were administered and collected directly by hand. The data collected were analyzed using mean, standard deviation and pearson product-moment correlation statistic. Pearson product-moment correlation co-efficient and simple linear regression were used to test the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significant. The findings of the study showed that parents’ inability to trust the adolescent students with responsibilities, parents treating adolescent student like a child, parents feeling adolescent students are lazy with their school works, adolescent students inability to discuss their problems with their parents among others are the causes of adolescent-parent conflict in Umuahia Education Zone. There was a high extent of correlation between adolescent-parent conflict and self-esteem of senior secondary school students. And there was a high extent of correlation between adolescent-parent conflict and academic performance of senior secondary school students. There was a low extent of correlation between adolescent-parent conflict and male and female students’ self-esteem in public secondary schools. It also found out that there was a high extent of correlation between adolescent-parent conflict and male adolescents’ academic performance in Secondary Schools. The study concluded that adolescent-parent conflict affects self-esteem and academic performance of both male and female senior secondary school students. Based on the findings, discussion, implication and recommendations were made. One of the recommendations was that there is need for school counsellors to expose parents periodically to workshops and seminars on the parenting skills and ethics so as to enhance the development of high self-esteem in adolescent students and eliminate adolescent-parent conflicts.