Emotional intelligence as a correlate of self-esteem and academic adjustment of in-school adolescents.

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INTRODUCTION

Background of the Study

The adolescents are individuals bounded by childhood and adulthood. The upper limit of adolescence is the beginning of adulthood while the lower limit is bounded by childhood. The adolescents in most cases fall within the secondary school years, and educators expect the adolescents to be out of secondary schools at 18 years (Santrock, 2005). In this study, adolescents are taken to be people between ages 11 and 18years. This age group is unique in the sense that several developmental changes manifest in them and determine to a great extent their temperament and approaches to certain issues of life.In-school adolescents undergo profound changes during their adolescent years in their physiological, social, intellectual and moral development. The in–school adolescents are adolescents who are currently in secondary schools. The major developmental task of adolescence was seen by Atkinson, Atkinson, Smith, Bem and Nolen-Hocksema (1993) as being able to create an identity, to develop answers to questions such as: who am I? Where am I going? Atkinson et al maintained that the psychoanalyst, Erikson coined the term identity crisis to refer to this active process of self-definition. The word crisis is perhaps unfortunate because Erikson believed this period of self-doubt to be an integral part of healthy psychological development. Similarly, most developmental psychologists believe that adolescence should be a period of role experimentation (Santrock, 2005). This is a period of self-doubt or period of role experimentation in which the young persons can explore alternative behaviours, interest and ideologies. Many beliefs, roles, and ways of behaving may be ‘tried out’, modified, or discarded in an attempt to shape an integrated concept of the self. Ideally, the identity crisis should be resolved by the early or mid-twenties so that the individual can move on to other life tasks but this is not always the case as some of the adolescents may fail to resolve the identity crisis till later in life.

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