The study investigated social networking and participation as predictors of teachers’ emotional intelligence in public secondary schools in Rivers State. Two objectives, two research questions as well as two hypotheses were postulated to guide the study. The design for the study was correlational design. The population of the study comprised all the 16,743 public secondary school teachers in Rivers State out of which 376 teachers were sampled for the study through multi-stage sampling technique. Two questionnaires which were a 35-tem questionnaire titled “Social Capital Investment Scale” (SCIS) as well as 40-item questionnaire titled Emotional Intelligence Scale” (EIS) were the instruments used for the collection of data for the study. The questionnaires were validated by three experts in the area of Measurement and Evaluation, Department of Psychology, Guidance and Counseling, Faculty of Education, University of Port Harcourt. However, for the reliability, Cronbach Alpha was used to determine the internal consistency of the questionnaires with reliability co-efficients of 0.76 and 0.83 for the sections of the independent variable and 0.96 for the dependent variable. The research questions were answered using Pearson Product Moment Correlation while the hypotheses were tested using z-ratio at 0.05 level of significance. The findings of the study showed that there was a positive relationship between social networking and teacher’s emotional intelligence. Similarly, a positive relationship exists between social participation and teachers’ emotional intelligence in public secondary schools in Rivers State. It was recommended that school administrators should endeavor to organize social activities among teachers, parents and students as often as possible to encourage teachers’ participation and freedom of association should be promoted in order to strengthen social networking in these schools.
Keywords: Emotional Intelligence, Secondary Schools, Social Networking, Social Participation, Teachers
