PSYCHOLOGICAL DETERMINANTS OF DISSOCIATIVE IDENTITY DISORDER AMONG SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS IN PORT HARCOURT METROPOLIS, RIVERS STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

The study investigated the psychological determinants of dissociative identity disorder among secondary school students in Port Harcourt metropolis. Stress, anxiety and depression constitute the psychological determinants examined in this study. Three objectives, three research questions and corresponding null hypotheses were tested at 0.05 alpha level. The correlational research design was adopted. The population of the study comprised all the 3913 SS2 Students in all public secondary schools in Port Harcourt. A simple random sampling technique was used to draw ten schools. A purposive sampling was then used to get 175 dissociative identity disorder identified students.Two non cognitive instruments were designed by the researchers titled Stress, Anxiety and Depression Scale (SADS) and Adolescent Dissociative Experience Scale (ADES) were used for data collection. The SADS and ADES contained 30 items for each with alternative responses of Always, Often, Sometimes and Never. Face and content validities of the instruments were ensured by experts in Educational Psychology, Guidance and Counselling. Cronbach alpha was used to establish the reliability coefficient of ADES which yielded the calculated indexes of 0.84 and 0.75, 0.82 and 0.69 for the subscales of stress, anxiety and depression respectively. The simple regression was used to answer the research question while T- test and simple regression were used to test the null hypothesis at 0.05 level of significance. It was found out that there is a significant relationship between stress, depression, anxiety and dissociative identity disorder among students in secondary schools in PortHarcourt metropolis. It was concluded that stress, anxiety and depression mismanagement bring about dissociative identity disorder, and so awareness on how to manage stress, anxiety and depression should be created by guidance counselors in schools.