Attitude of Parents toward Female-Child Secondary Education in Sokoto State, Nigeria: Implications for Counselling

Abstract

The study was set out to investigate the attitude of parents toward female-child secondary education in Sokoto State, Nigeria. One research question and one hypothesis were formulated to guide the study. The study is a descriptive survey and made use of ex-post facto design. The researcher made use of purposive sampling technique to select 270 parents from the urban and 270 parents from the rural areas of Sokoto State. The researcher made use of an instrument adapted from that of Terhemba and Umaru 2015. The instrument is known as “Attitude of Parents Toward Female Child Secondary Education Questionnaire” (APTFCSEQ). The APTFCSEQ had a reliability coefficient of 0.81. The instrument had facial and content validity. It also had language appropriateness. The researcher used four (4) research Assistants to administer 540 copies of the questionnaire on the respondents. All the 540 copies of the questionnaire were retrieved showing 100 percent return rate. The data generated from the field were collated and the mean score analysis for the 15 items was carried out in order to provide answer to the research question raised in the study. 2.5 was chosen as the benchmark for either disagreeing or agreeing with each of the 15 items. The t-test statistics was used to test the hypothesis at 0.05 level of significance. The investigation found out that parents in Sokoto State have shown unfavourable attitude toward female-child secondary education. It found out that there is no significant difference between parents in the urban and rural areas in their attitude toward female-child secondary education. This finding has shown that whether the parent is in urban or rural area, all of them have expressed their opinion in the same direction. One of the recommendations of the study is that parents in Sokoto State should show favourable attitude toward female-child secondary education.