CONTEMPORARY JOURNAL OF APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY

Truancy has always been a major challenge to the success of the educational system, a problem that has been especially titanic for most southwestern states in Nigeria, especially Oyo State as high levels of truancy have been responsible for high social vices and crime rates among the adolescents and youths. The current study attempts to investigate the role of emotional intelligence and gender in the truancy of in-school adolescents in Ibadan. The research adopted an ex-post facto research design that used a multistage sampling technique to select 1,215 in-school adolescents from 6 local governments in Ibadan comprising of 638 (52.51%) males and 577 (47.49%) females, with ages between 14 and 19 years. A self-administered structured questionnaire that contained validated scales measuring truancy with the 24-item school refusal assessment scale by Kearney (2002), emotional intelligence with trait emotional intelligence scale–adolescent short form (TEIQueAsf) by Petrides, Chamorro-Permuzic, Furnham, and Frederickson (2005), and gender was used for data collection. Three hypotheses were stated and tested at a .05 level of significance. Emotional intelligence dimensions significantly predicted truancy among secondary school students and accounted for 4.1% of the observed variance (R2= .041, F(4,1210)= 12.924, p<.01); only the independent contribution of wellbeing (â = -.168, t= -5.887, p<.01) and selfcontrol (â = -.106, t= -3.762, p<.01) dimensions of emotional intelligence were significant. Male students (X =59.50, SD=23.66) were significantly higher on truancy than female students (X =55.77, SD=21.51) (t(1212) = 2.868, p<.01). Gender significantly moderated the relationship of wellbeing emotional intelligence with truancy (R2? = .005; F? (1,1210) = 6.770, p? <.01) and emotionality emotional intelligence with truancy (R2? = .006; F? (1,1210) = 7.465, p? <.01) but did not significantly moderate the relationship of self-control emotional intelligence with truancy (R2? = .001; F? (1,1210) = 11.780, p? >.05) and sociability emotional intelligence with truancy (R2? = .000; F? (1,1210) = .432, p? >.05).It was concluded that adolescents that possess high rates of emotional intelligence and females are at a lower risk of truancy. It was recommended that interventions on truancy be focused on male adolescents especially those with lower trait emotional intelligence

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