Awareness, Utilization and Barriers to Utilization of Cyber Counselling Platforms in Managing Mental Health by undergraduates in public universities in Cross River State, Nigeria

This dataset is for a study that adopted descriptive survey research design to investigate the level of awareness on, extent of utilization and barriers hindering utilization of, cyber counselling platforms in managing mental health by undergraduates in public universities in Cross River State, Nigeria. The study was guided by four research questions. A sample of 800 respondents was selected from a population of sixty-five thousand and nine hundred (65,900) undergraduates in the two public universities in the study area.

A researchers-developed instrument entitled “Questionnaire on Awareness, Utilization and Barriers to Utilization of Cyber Counselling Platforms” (QAUBUCCP) was used for data collection. The instrument was validated by three experts in relevant fields and the reliability of the instrument was obtained as 0.84, using Cronbach alpha statistics. The instrument had two sections – A and B. Section A elicited demographic information of the participants, while section B had three parts, I, II and III. They sought to obtain information on level of awareness on cyber counselling platforms, extent of utilization of cyber counselling platforms, and barriers to the utilization of cyber counselling platforms respectively. The Part I had nine items, while parts II and III had seven items each. The QAUBUCCP was constructed using Likert-like scale response options which were modified for the different parts of the instrument. Part I had Very True (VT), True (T), Untrue (U) and Very Untrue (UT) as the response options, while Part II had “5 times and above,” “3 to 4 times,” “1 to 2 times,” and “not at all” as the response options. Part III on its part had Strongly Agree (SA), Agree (A), Disagree (D) and Strongly Disagree (SD) as the response options. These responses were all scored 4, 3, 2 and 1 respectively; and this coding is what is presented on the dataset.

Frequencies, percentages, bar charts, Pearson Product Moment Correlation, mean and standard deviation were used for data analysis. The results indicated, among others, that the level of awareness on cyber counselling platforms among undergraduates in public universities in Cross River State, Nigeria is moderately high, and that there is a very low extent of utilization of cyber counselling platforms among undergraduates in public universities in Cross River State, Nigeria.