Investigating the Prevalent Aggressive Behaviour and the Psychosocial Factors Responsible for such among Secondary School Students in Kogi State, Nigeria

Résumé

The purpose of this study is to investigate the prevalent aggressive behaviour and the psychosocial factors responsible for such among secondary school students in Kogi State, Nigeria. Specific objectives were raised based on which research questions and hypotheses were generated. The designs adopted for this study are descriptive survey research design where a sample of 394 students were randomly selected from the population of 25,537 students in secondary school in Kogi State. A Multi-stage sampling was employed in this study which involved stratified random sampling to select schools and proportionate sampling technique to select number of participants and simple random sampling at the final stage. Structured questionnaires were administered, and the data collected subjected to analysis using frequency distributions, percentages, means, t-test and Analysis of Variance. The result revealed most prevalent aggressive behaviour among the secondary school students to include becoming so mad that they may want to break things, wanting to exchange blows or engage in a fight, feeling like a powder keg ready to explode, trouble controlling their temper, threatening people, wanting to hit another person when provoked.   The study also found that growing up in a crowded home, inadequate family income, single parenting, addiction to alcohol and drug abuse are some factors that constitute the psychosocial factors of aggressive behaviour. In comparison to other literatures, it is hereby concluded the prevalent aggressive among secondary school students is peculiar to each locality.