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ABSTRACT
This study compared the prevalence of substance abuse among secondary school students in Urban and Rural area of Edo State. Research has shown that the key risk periods for substance abuse are during major transitions in children’s lives, The first big transition for children is when they leave the security of the family and enter school. Later, when they advance from elementary school to middle school, they often experience new academic and social situations such as learning to get along with a wider group of peers. It is at this stage (early adolescence) that children are likely to encounter substance for the first time. Five research questions were raised to guide the study while 4 hypotheses were formulated.
Descriptive survey design was used for the study. The population of the study consists of all public secondary school in Oredo and Ovia North East Local Government Area. The population comprised of 22,824 senior and junior secondary schools in both local government. The sample for the study was 200 respondents. Simple random sampling technique was used to select 10 SS3 and JSS3 students each for the 10 purposively sampled schools. The instrument used for this study is questionnaire titled prevalence of substance abuse developed by the researcher. The instrument was validated by experts in the Department of Educational Evaluation and Counselling Psychology in the Faculty of Education, University of Benin and had a reliability of 0.792. The research hypotheses were tested using independent sample T-test for hypotheses 1, 2 and 3 while ANOVA was used for hypothesis 4 and all hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance.
The study revealed that there is high prevalence of substance abuse among secondary school students. There is no significant difference in the prevalence of substance abuse among male and female secondary school students. There is no significant difference in the prevalence of substance abuse between senior and junior secondary school students. That students in girls school indulge more in substance abuse than students in boys school and students in mixed schools appears to be the same in terms of substance abuse. Based on the findings it was recommended that parents and guardians should educate their children about the dangers of substance abuse and the consequences involved in associating with those engaged in substance abuse. The members of the communities should also see it as a task to report any student involved in any incident of substance abuse to parents and school authorities.
