Dimensions of Emotional Maltreatment of School Adolescents at Home: Implications for Counselling Practice

Abstract

Human beings at birth are naturally bequeathed to express their pleasant and unpleasant dispositions to people and life events around them. Unpleasant feeling is an indication of emotional maltreatment by significant others. The emotional maltreatment originating from parents/guardian was the subject of investigation of this study. The frequency of occurrence of seven dimensions of emotional abuse and their influence on gender and family type bases were examined among four hundred and eighty (215 males and 265 females) adolescents purposively selected from fifteen private secondary schools in Ota, Nigeria. Questionnaire on Seven Dimensions of Emotional Maltreatment at Home (QSDEMH) developed and validated by the researcher was employed for data generation. Two research questions and two research hypotheses guided the direction of the study. The results indicated that in order of pervasiveness isolating tops the list of emotional dimensions (x=9.62) while corrupting (x=7.15) was the least. Further analysis showed that there was no significance difference on gender basis (t-cal =1.560.05); while there was a significant difference on family type (monogamy and polygamy) basis (t-cal =-5.74