Major psycho social factors contributing to dropout among secondary school girls in Guraghe Zone

Abstract There appear to be a general agreement that girls are less favored, socially and culturally, than boys of the developing world. About 60% of the peoples of Ethiopia, most of them being women, are believed to be victims of harmful traditional beliefs. Thus, girls are marginalized and suppressed, due to long standing deeply held traditions and practices, both at family & community level. Large number of studies also indicated that such kind of environmental maltreatment of girls affect their psychosocial development which in turn affects their schooling. Hence, this study is conducted in two secondary schools in order to understand psychosocial problems contributing to girl s dropout, and the development of psychological problems among girls in those schools. To meet this purpose, mixed (qualitative and quantitative) research approach was used. Particularly, questionnaires, semi structured interviews and observation as well as document analysis have been applied in the process of data collection. Key findings show that the dropout rate of girls is lower than that of boys as girls are now getting significant support both from government and non governmental organizations. However, unassertive behaviour, inferiority, and low self-esteem are found as the major psychological problems of girls. Besides, different harassments, lack of study time, lack of knowledge among parents about girls education, financial problem, number of children in the family, unplanned marriage and pregnancy ,shyness, loneliness, and poor communication skills are identified to be some of the social problems of girls in the Schools. The results of this study also showed that girls develop different psychological problems due to such kind of social, cultural and gender biased unfavourable situations. In addition, the statistical findings also indicate that peer influence increases as grade level increases but decline at a certain point. Moreover, spearman correlation showed that grade level and most of the factors that facilitate girls school dropout are negatively related. Most of the correlations are also identified to be significant at 0.01 and 0.05 levels. Particularly, academic failure, health problem, peer influence, unplanned pregnancy, marriage, and different harassment of girls are identified to be highly statistically significant at 0.01 levels