A Comparative Study of Urban and Rural Students on Emotional Intelligence and Adjustment

Abstract

According to Salary and Mayer (1990) emotional intelligence in being able to monitor one's own and other's feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this to guide one's thinking and actions. It means emotionally intelligent person in skilled in four areas identifying, using, understanding and regulating emotions. Goleman (1995) also stressed that emotional intelligence consists of five components: 1) Knowing one's emotions (Self awareness) 2) managing them (emotions) 3) motivating self 4)recognizing emotions in others (empathy) and 5) handling relationships. He stated that family and school are the places which can develop emotional intelligence.Adjustment refers to the ability of an individual to fit into his environment. Good (1959) stated that adjustment is a process of finding and adopting modes of behavior suitable to the environment or changes in the environment. According to shafFer (1961) adjustment in the process by which a living organism maintains a balance between its needs and the circumstances that influence the satisfaction of these needs. Kulshrestha (1979) explained that the adjustment process is a way in which the individual attempts to deal with stress, tensions, conflicts etc., and meet his or her needs. In this process the individual makes effort to maintain harmonious relationships with the environment.The school and home plays the major role of socialization of any child, an school child learns social communications, handling emotions and management of day to day interactions.Raju & Rahamtulla (2007) reported that boys are significantly better adjusted than girls. Similar findings are reported by Kashinath (1990)and Pradhan(1993).Several studies have been reported in the area of social, educational, health and emotional intelligence of school students. Some researchers studied the variables like achievement, age, sex, socio-economic status ,parental education, parental occupation and so on. But studies regarding specific locale differences as urban and rural, are very few. Singh, Chawdhari and Asthana (2008) have reported that emotional intelligence is significantly differ in urban and rural adolescents. He indicated that urban adolescents are better than rural adolescents on emotional intelligence. But Shanwal (2004) found that rural children are emotionally more intelligent than urban children. Singravelu (2007) found no significant difference in male and female student teachers on emotional intelligence with respect to locality and residence.Punia and Sangwan (2011) reported that the urban adolescents had comparatively better emotional intelligence and adjustment against rural counterparts. Lindgren (1959) defined 'adjustment as the act or process of established a satisfactory psychological relationship between the individual and the environment. Kasinath (1990) revealed that these is no significant difference in the total adjustment scores of urban and rural boys and girls studying in Navodaya Vidyalayas in respect of their emotional , social and educational adjustment. Sujatha Gaonkar, khadi andKatarki (1993) reported that there is no significant difference between urban and rural students on adjustment.Alexander and Packiam (1998) designed to find out the adjustment problems of male and female school going adolescents from urban and rural area. Study revealed that there is no significant difference is the proportion of maladjustment among the urban students. Urban students have more problems than rural students.In this study urban and rural residence is considered. The urban and rural areas have their own distinctive features and they differ predominantly with each other in terms of homogeneity, integrity, occupations, environmental differences, social traditions, differences in size of communities, differences in physical facilities and educational level.Urban and rural residence also differentiated on the basis of psychological attributes. …