Impact of Child Abuse on Academic Performance

Love should not hurt indeed!!!

This is one of the research I worked on in 2015, shortly after I graduated from the university (called college in some parts of the world). As a student of Statistics, wowed at the level of knowledge and informations that data analysis welds, I started consulting for others, this was one of the numerous which am going to post here regularly.

IBM SPSS version 20 was used to carry out the analysis. 100 questionaires responses were inputted and analysed. This research tackled four questions:

• What are the perceptions of secondary school students about child abuse?
• What type of child abuse practices are prevalent in the study area?
• What is the relationship between child abuse and school attendance?
• What is the relationship between child abuse and academic performance?

Offcourse, the demographic information of the respondents was first analysed, as this will help us know whether our dataset is random and unbiased, insight about the study area, their personality and groupings; but for privacy reasons, this part will not be discussed. The pictures below shows the data view and variable of the dataset in SPSS

Dataview page of the dataset

Variable view of the dataset on SPSS, We could see already that DI — D7 represents demographic informations

Frequency & Percentage, Descriptives and Chi square distribution were used to compute the findings. The remarks in the descriptives was interpreted with the mean values, which follows the likert scales used in the questionnaire labelled as: Strongly Agree =1, Agreed = 2, Strongly Disagreed =3 and Disagreed = 4 while Yes =1 and No = 2.

In other to cut the story short, I will only show the descriptives and the Chisquare part of the analysis. Chisquare test was used to validate the insights, while below shows the hypothesis that helps us arrive at a conclusion.

Hypothesis Testing:

Accept Null : The respondents’ reponses were insignificant

Accept Alternative: The respondents’ responses were significant

1. What is the perception of secondary school students about child abuse?

The mean values were used to determine the remark where <0.5 to 1.4 means approximately yes and 1.5 to >2 means approximately no. Other responses were arranged and labelled in same format, say from 1 to the last response.

The table above reveals that the respondents are well aware of the elements of child abuse, seeing that they gave appropriate responses; nevetheless, many of them may not have suffered child abuse but testifies that Neglect is popular type of abuse in the study area.

A frequency and percentage table will be appropriate to display the classification of their responses. Chi-square test is shown below to validate the responses of the research question.

Hypothesis testing to validate responses

From the table above; since tabulated is > calculated at 5% level of significance, for all the responses of the respondents this implies that the respondents’ perception about child abuse was significant.

2. What type of child abuse practices are prevalent in the study area

The mean values were used to determine the remark of theresponse, according to the likert scale.

From the above, majority of the respondents responded that: Hawking, Child labour, unwanted pregnancy and educational denial were the prevalent child abuse practices in study area while rape, child prostitution, kidnapping and human trafficking was’nt prevalent. The table also reveals that that child prostitution may not be a common practice since it’s on the average.

Hypthesis test to find out the prevalent child abuse practice in the study area.

From the table above; since Chisquare calculated < tabulated, at 5% level of significance, we accept the alternative hypothesis and conclude that the responses on some prevalent child abuse practice were significance, i.e. actually believable/ true.

3. What is the relationship between child abuse and school attendance

Mean values were used to determine the remark

From the above, the remark on the responses shows that the respondents were fully aware of the deteriorating effect of child abuse on school attendance, and agreed to the relationship on poor child’s health, lack of study interest… which is related to their attendance in school.

Hypothesis test to validate responses

The table above confirms that there is significant relationship between child abuse and school attendance in the study area.

4. What is the relationship between child abuse and academic performance?

mean ± std. Deviation of responses. N shows that 100 respondents were consider in the study area

The table above tells us that the repondents fully understand the relationship between child abuse and academic performance. This further tells the readers that child abuse can affect a child’s confidence, willingness to study, and also be traumatic as a children focus is tampered with. Hythesis testing will validate these insights in the next table

validating the insight

The above table affirms that the respondents responses to the effect of child abuse and school performance are related hence significant.

This is the end of the data analysis of this research work; while it serves as a backup to curb child abuse in the world. As we all are aware that a child’s education is very important at their formative years, child abuse will do lots of worse than good, sadly this may turn them to a traumatised, unhealthy…adult. Hence, to make the society a safe and happy place on the long run children should be well catered for because THEY ARE THE ADULT OF TOMORROW.

Drop your questions and contributions in the comment section below, you can also contact me on Twitter or Facebook or via my portfolio, I am opened for more explanations.