SOURCE:

Faculty: Education
Department: Guidance And Counselling

CONTRIBUTORS:

Efosa-Ehioghiren, A. I.
Ebenebe, R. C.

ABSTRACT:

Adolescents in schools tend to exhibit unacceptable behaviours which invariably affect their social adjustments. Some of these problems emanate from their home and school environments (externally determined) but many arise as a result of their personality type (internally determined). The personality type of an individual affects the way, he/she relates with others and would influence the adolescents social pattern. An understanding of the personality type of adolescent and their social adjustment will help the school counsellors. When these problems are not effectively handled, these adolescents end up manifesting deviant behaviours. The purpose of this study was to determine the adolescents’ personality types as correlates of their social adjustment. The study utilized correlation research design to determine the relationship between the adolescents’ personality types of introversion and extroversion and their social adjustment. The population of the study was 48,867 junior secondary school adolescents in Edo South Senatorial District of Edo State. The sample for the study consisted of 720 adolescent students’ drawn through multi-stage sampling procedure. Two instruments were used in this study namely; the Eysenck personality questionnaire (EPQ) and Social Adjustment Scale (SAS). The internal consistency reliability alpha coefficient obtained 0. 78. The findings from the study revealed amongst others, that large number of females’ adolescent introverts and extroverts exist in the public junior secondary schools; while the male adolescent introverts and extroverts were not much. Furthermore, the study revealed that there is no significant relationship between adolescents introversion and their social adjustment and also that there is no significant relationship between adolescent male introverts and their social adjustment. on the findings of the study, therefore, it was also recommended that school counsellors should provide frequent counselling services for adolescents and information that could improve their social adjustment and the counsellors should also encouraged parents to expose their children especially (adolescents) to sound formal education as well as training them in social norms. Counsellors should map out ways of helping extroverts and introverts adolescent to adjust from various mal-adaptive behaviours in order to maintain a balance, so as to enhance their social adjustment so that adolescents’ unique personality types will be taken into consideration since the obvious is the fact that they are coming from different homes with different backgrounds and ideologies.