ABSTRACT
The purpose of this study was to investigate the Influence of Counselling and Information Services on the Career Decision Making of Secondary School Students in Ikpoba-okha Local Government Area, Edo State. Students go through life making several plans for the future and one of such important plan is deciding on the right career path to follow. Some individuals experience unsatisfactory career life. The realistic way to avoid this is for students to understand themselves in relation to their career interest, and go for a profession that suits their self-concept.
Correlational survey research design was used for the study. Six research questions were raised to guide the study which was also formulated to hypotheses. The population consisted of all the public senior secondary school in the local government area. The sample comprised of six senior secondary schools. The sample population for the study was 300 respondents, which consist of 121 females and 179 males. Simple random sampling technique was used to select 50 SSS 3 students each from the six purposively sampled schools. The instruments used for this study include; Counselling Service Scale, Information Service Scale, developed by the researcher; and Career Decision Making Scale developed by (Osipow, 1987) and adapted by the researcher. The instruments were validated by experts in the Department of Educational Evaluation and Counselling Psychology in the Faculty of Education, University of Benin, and had a reliability coefficient of .782, .756 and.748 respectively. The research hypotheses were tested using correlation for hypotheses 1-2 and Fisher Z statistics for hypotheses 3-6, and tested at 0.05 level of significance.
The study revealed that there is a significant but weak positive relationship between counselling service and the career decision making of secondary school students. There is a significant but weak positive relationship between information and career decision making. The relationship between counselling service and career decision making differ by the sex of the students. The relationship between information service and career decision making differ by the sex of students. The relationship between counselling service and career decision making differ by the age of the students. The relationship between information service and career decision making does not differ by age. Based on findings: it was recommended that secondary school administrators should put in place proper guidance and counselling programme in schools and also counsellors should be well trained on processing and disseminating accurate information to students.
