A Study of the Effect of Home Background, Environmental Factors, Emotional Intelligence and Peer Influence on Students' Academic Performance

This study examined the effect of home background, environmental factors, emotional intelligence and peer influence on students" academic performance. For the successful execution of this research work, primary data via self- administered questionnaires was employed. These were administered to 150 randomly selected secondary school students (male and female) in Abeokuta metropolis of Ogun State vis-a-vis stratified and simple random sampling technique. Data collected were analysed electronically using SPSS 21. The analysis techniques employed were Percentages, Multiple Regression, Correlation Matrix and Coefficient of Determination. Results from the analysis revealed that home background, environmental factors and emotional intelligence have positive effect on students" academic performance while peer influence has negative effect on students" academic performance. However, of the three positive effects from home background, environmental factors and emotional intelligence, only the positive effects from environmental factors and emotional intelligence is statistically significant at 95% confidence level. Home background exerts insignificant effects on students" academic performance. The negative effect of peer influenceis statistically significant on students" academic performance.In terms of magnitude of effect, emotional intelligence has the most effect on students" academic performance followed by environmental factors, home background and peer influence.The regression ANOVA indicates that the effects of home background, environmental factors, emotional intelligence and peer influence are jointly significant on students" academic performance. In addition, home background, environmental factors, emotional intelligence and peer influencecontribute to approximately 30.9% of the variation in students" academic performance. The multiple correlation coefficient value of 0.556 indicates that there is an average positive but imperfect relationship between the regressand (academic performance) and the regressors (home background, environmental factor, emotional intelligence and peer influence).