Emotional Intelligence, Social Networking Skills and Online Counselling Communication Effectiveness Among Students of OAU, Ile-Ife, Nigeria

Abstract

With a view to providing empirical information on the factors that influence online counselling communication among Nigerian university students, this study investigated the influence of emotional intelligence and social networking skills on the effectiveness of online counselling communication among students of Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU). Through a descriptive survey research design, the study sampled 100 students purposively from users of the University online counselling platform, on the basis of being able to have established complete counselling interaction with any of the counsellors online during the harmattan and rain semesters of 2017/2018 session (or over a period of 12 months.). The results showed that 78.0%, 19.0% and 3.0% of the students demonstrated high, moderate and low levels of online counselling communication effectiveness respectively and that emotional intelligence has significant influence on online communication effectiveness (β = 0.790, p < 0.05). The results further showed that social networking skills has no significant influence on online communication effectiveness (F = 3.457, p > 0.05) and no significant interaction effect of emotional intelligence and social networking skill was found on online counselling communication effectiveness (F = 0.546, p > 0.05). The study concluded that the only factor that influenced online counselling communication effectiveness among the students under study is emotional intelligence