Publication:

Prevalence and psychosocial aspects of verbal aggression among adolescents in rural block of Haryana

Background Aggression refers to behaviour which causes intentional harm to others. There are about 1.2 billion adolescents in the world today, making 16% of the world’s population. Now a day, it is a common phenomenon to find adolescents being involved in aggressive activities frequently. Various studies in India has observed that prevalence of verbal aggression varies between 50% and 70% with more aggression among male as compared to females. The studies regarding the prevalence of verbal aggression are relatively scarce in the particular study area. Hence this study was conducted with an objective to estimate the prevalence of verbal aggression among adolescents and to study the psychosocial aspects of the aggression among them.

Methods A 29-item Buss and Perry scale interview schedule was used to estimate level of verbal aggression among school going adolescents in rural block of Haryana. Data was collected, compiled and analysed using SPSS.

Results A total number of 480 study participants were enrolled in the study. The prevalence of verbal aggression was observed to be 48.3% in the study participants. Mean score of the verbal aggression was 16.60±3.619. History of substance abuse was significantly associated with verbal aggression (p<0.001).

Conclusions From our study it may be concluded that verbal aggression is high among school going adolescents. Overall males were more verbally aggressive than females. Substance abuse was significantly associated with verbal aggression, while other factors like socio-economic class, age, classes were not significantly associated.