Psychological effects of rural versus urban environment on adolescent’s behaviour following pubertal changes

Abstract

Effects of urban versus rural environment on pubertal changes have lately been an issue of greater concern to researches interested in studying adolescent developmental stages. This study adopted Erickson‘s ecological theory in understanding the effects of environment on the pubertal changes of Nigerian youth. The study involves 350 (170 [48.57%] males & 180 [51.43%] females) urban and rural adolescents from Ibadan, Oyo State and Esie-Iludun, Kwara State, Nigeria participated in the study. Out of this, 167 [47.71%] were urban adolescents, and 183 [52.28%] were rural adolescents. Participants age range = 13-19 years, with a mean age of 14.54 {sd = 3.12} years. Six hypotheses were raised and tested at 0.05 level of significance. Adolescent Sexual Behaviour & Cultural Belief Inventory was utilized for data collection. The descriptive statistics and Student t.test statistics were used in data analysis between urban versus rural environments and within gender. The finding showed that the mean score of urban adolescent [52.29 (sd = 11.0)] is higher than that of the rural adolescents [47.71(sd = 13.13)]. The differences found may be influenced by environment. This implies that environment (rural & urban) has influence on adolescents following the onset of puberty. But the difference is not significant at P<0.05, df =348, t =1.045.