PERSONALITY TRAITS AND PSYCHOSOCIAL ADJUSTMENT OF STUDENTS WITH ACQUIRED PHYSICAL DISABILITIES IN IMO STATE, NIGERIA

The relevance of psychosocial adjustment in ensuring the overall wellbeing of students with acquired disability led to investigation of the relationship between personality traits of students with acquired physical disability and their psychosocial adjustment. A correlation research design was used for the study, as well as five research questions raised and five hypotheses formulated. The population for the study consisted of all secondary students with physical disabilities in the 70 public secondary schools in Owerri Education Zone 1 from which a total of 79 students were sampled purposively for the study. The instruments for data collection were researcher-made and titled “Personality Traits Scale” (PTS) and “Psychosocial Adjustment Scale” (PAS) which were face and content validated by specialists in Educational Psychology and Measurement and Evaluation. To test its reliability, Cronbach Alpha statistics was used to test its internal consistencies which yielded a value of .77 for PTS and .76 for PAS. The data obtained were analysed using Pearson Product Moment Correlation to answer the research questions while the hypotheses were tested using p-val at .05 level of significance. The result obtained showed that openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, all have a positive significant relationship with psychosocial adjustment of students with acquired physical disability while neuroticism has a negative significant relationship with psychosocial adjustment. Based on the findings, it was recommended that teachers should assign collaborative tasks to students in order to encourage social interaction between disabled and non-disabled students