Secondary School Students’ Perception of Online Counselling in Lagos Mainland, Nigeri

Abstract

Although technology is critical to the effectiveness of the Nigerian educational system, its
use in counselling among secondary school students remains limited. For instance,
secondary school students encounter several problems on a daily basis but are often too
shy to share them with counsellors through the conventional (face-to-face) method of
counselling. Inevitably, those issues end up taking a toll on their psychosocial well-being
and academic performance. Thus, students frequently fail to get appropriate and efficient
counselling through readily available conventional methods. In the bid to address this
issue, researchers have suggested the use of electronic counselling (e-counselling) to
complement the conventional method. To that end, this study investigated secondary
school students’ perception of online counselling in Lagos Mainland, Nigeria. The study
used a descriptive survey design in capturing the views of 200 secondary students in
Lagos Mainland Local Government who were randomly selected from four schools. The
data collection instrument was a questionnaire developed by the researchers and
validated by experts. Two hypotheses were tested at a .05 level of significance using an
independent t-test. The results found no gender difference in students’ perception of
online counselling. Students experiencing psychosocial distress - notably from bullying,
mood swings, academic pressure and sexual abuse - preferred online counselling. It is
therefore suggested that online counselling should be integrated into the counselling
methodology in Nigerian secondary schools, since the online medium permits more
eliciting of sensitive issues compared to purely educational ones