Relationship Between Peer Group Influence, Parental Psychological Support and Students’ Academic Performance in Junior Secondary Schools in Jega Educational Zone, Kebbi State

The study investigated the relationship between peer group influence, parental psychological support and student’s academic performance in junior secondary schools in Jega educational zone, Kebbi state. The study used expost factor design. Cluster and simple random sampling were used to select the sample size. Four junior secondary schools with a total population of 504 and a sample size of 217 students were drawn and used for the study. The study made use of instruments adapted from Azua, (2016). The instrument is known as Peer support inventory and parental support inventory. The academic performance was obtained from the scores in English language and mathematics from the students’ end of term examinations. Two hypotheses were formulated for this study and tested using Pearson Product Moment Correlation. The findings of the study show that there is a significant relationship between peer support and academic performance of junior secondary school students (r=0.731, p=0.004), also a significant relationship exist between parental psychological support and academic performance of junior secondary school students (r=0.743, p=0.002). It is recommended that parents should actively participate and offer psychological support to their children by way of interacting with their children about peer group influence and thus, repositioning them skillfully towards excellent academic performance. Keywords: Peer group influence, Parental psychological support, Educational zone and Academic performance. DOI: 10.7176/JEP/11-15-13 Publication date:May 31st 202