Assessment of Social Functioning among Adolescent School-going Children in Hooghly District, West Bengal, India: A Cross-sectional Study

Introduction: Adolescents form a socially significant segment of the population. The analysis of social functioning, a sensitive indicator of underlying mental ailments, amongst them is a good measure to find out their mental health status.

Aim: To assess the social functioning skills and its associated factors among adolescent school-going children in Hooghly District, West Bengal, India.

Materials and Methods: A descriptive, cross-sectional questionnaire-based was conducted among 1056 (mean {SD) age=15.53±1.3 years} school-going adolescent children in four randomly selected English medium private co-educational schools, from Class IX to XII, in Hooghly District, West Bengal, India, for a period of two months from June 2022-July 2022. The Child and Adolescent Social and Adaptive Functioning Scale (CASAFS), a validated tool consisting of 24 items designed to measure psychosocial functioning, was used. A Likert scale scoring was done for each item. Adolescents scoring below the 75th percentile of the total score were classified as “poor social adaptive functioning skill” and those above 75th percentile as “good social adaptive functioning skill”. The data was analysed using IBM Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), version 23.0 software. Descriptive statistics like mean, median, percentile, standard deviation were generated. Analytical statistics like chi-square test was applied to find out the relationship between categorical variables i.e., social functional skill and socio-demographic profile and a p-value of <0.05 was considered as significant.

Result: Out of 1056 students included in the study. There were 318 (30.1%) Class IX students, 229 (21.7%) Class X students, 204 (19.3%) Class XI students and 305 (28.9%) Class XII students. The age of the students ranged from 13 to 18 years. 219 (20.7%) had the good social functioning skill and 837 (79.3%) had poor social functioning skill. The mean (SD) score of all the domains combined was 70.5 (8.05), with ‘Family Relationship domain’ having highest mean (SD) score 19.5±3.0 and ‘Peer relationship domain’ having the least mean (SD) score 15.9±3.1. ‘Good social functioning skills’ was significantly associated with those belonging to the age group of 17-18 years, having increased number of siblings (p=0.001) higher mother’s educational status (p=0.003).

Conclusion: From the present study, it was observed that a very meagre number of students possessed good social functional ability. Improvement of social functioning skills indirectly helps in improving mental health and adolescents are the corner stones to initiate this process.