Influence Of Family Background On Academic Performance Of Secondary School Students
[A CASE STUDY OF ILORIN SOUTH LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA KWARA STATE, NIGERIA]

Instrumentation
    To elicit the needed data a researcher – designed instrument was used. The questionnaire was constructed after a critical review of relevant literature on family background parental environment. Socio-economic status, family size, parental career development and effect of marital problem, the instrument was tagged Influence of Family background on academic performance Questionnaire (IFAQ). The questionnaire that was used was developed by the researcher. It consist two (2) components (section A and B). Section A contains items eliciting information on personal data of students such as gender and age. Section B elicited information on students’ family background experience and responses to items in this section were used in categorizing the students in to various family background categories.
Psychometric property of the instrument validity
    Hassan (1995) described validity as an indication of the extent to which a measuring instrument measures what it is purpose to measure. Nwoye (1990) defined validity as the ability of the instrument to measure what it purport to measure. In he light of these, content and face validity of the instrument adopted for this study was determined. Therefore, in order to ascertain the validity of the instrument, the researcher gave the questionnaire to three (3) experts in the department of guidance and counselling for vetting. The suggestions of the experts were used to modify and confirmed the instrument as being good for the study.
Reliability
    Reliability is the consistency, accuracy, stability and trustworthiness of measuring instrument or scores obtained i.e. how far the same test would give the same result if it would be done again by the same students as different occasions or with different sets of equivalent items. Under the same condition (Oladele, 1997). Ndagunnu and Ajere (2003) opined that, the reliability of an instrument is the measure of its consistency and precision.
To establish the reliability of the instrument (IFAQ) the test re-test method was adopted. The instrument was administered on twenty (20) respondents twice at an interval of (3) weeks and the two (2) sets scores were subjected to the Pearson’s product moment correlation co-efficient formulae. Then the reliability was 0.68 which indicated a positive and high correlation between the two (2) sets of scores. In a nutshell, a reliability co-efficient showed that the instrument is consistent, accurate and reliable.
Procedure for data administration and collection
    The questionnaire for this study was administered by the researcher, with the help of research assistants who were trained on how to administer and collect instrument. The researcher gave adequate time for the filling of the questionnaire opportunity for explanation was also given on how to respond to the items. The questionnaire was collected immediately on completion to ensure 100% return rate.
 Method of data analysis
    Data collected were subjected to computation and analysed using frequency counts, percentage, Pearson product moment correlation co-efficient and t-test. All hypotheses were tested at 0.05 alpha level.