Self-destructive behaviours among secondary school learners at Mopani District, Limpopo Province

Abstract

South African secondary school children and adolescents are important members of society, and their knowledge and attitude about self-destructive behaviours could be highly influential in their lives. Recent social media trends have encouraged children and adolescents in schools to cause instability, bully each other, disrespect teachers and display bizarre behaviour. The purpose of this study was to investigate the knowledge and attitude of secondary school learners regarding self-destructive behaviour. The study was conducted in the Mopani District in the Greater Tzaneen Local Municipality at Nkowankowa educational circuit in the Limpopo Province. All the ten secondary schools with 8,772 learners within the circuit were targeted for the research study. Based on the sampling frame of 8,772, a sample size of 383 was calculated using Slovin’s formula. A stratified sampling selection process was employed using schools as strata, and then, within each stratum, simple random sampling was performed to select participants. The researcher randomly selected one secondary school from the educational circuit for the purposes of a pre-test of the instrument. After the pre-test, an adapted questionnaire from the ‘risky, impulsive, and self-destructive behaviour and Youth Risk Behaviour Survey Tool’ was used to confirm the validity of the instrument. A quantitative descriptive cross-sectional design was used to collect and analyse data for the study. It was discovered that up to 68.3 per cent of secondary school students that participated were aware of self-destructive behaviour, while 73.4 per cent had a positive attitude towards self-destructive behaviour. In addition, correlation analysis found that knowledge of self-destructive behaviour was significantly positively related to the attitude. Moreover, the study established significant differences between knowledge of and attitude towards self-destructive behaviour between male and female participants. Based on the findings of the study, it was recommended that the department of basic education needs to strengthen awareness levels on the nature of self-destructive behaviour and its implications on school-going learners.