The Altruistic Behaviors of Home-Reared, Institutionalized and Street Children
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Date
2001-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
The purpose of this study is to investigate the altruistic motives of homereared,
institutionalized and street chi ldren. The variations in altruistic motives
because of the differences in sex, age, grade and religiosity are also treated.
216 subjects were randomly selected fTom the three types of residence. Equal
numbers of male and female subj ects were taken from each res idence. The age of
the subjects range from IO-ISyears and their educational level range from illiterates
to 9th grade. Pro-social Motivation Questionnaire and Religiosity Scale were
adopted for the purpose of this study. The pro-social Motivation Questionnaire has
hedonism, self-orientation, conformity, task-orientation, other-orientation and
empathy sub scales, which were applied to measure altruistic behavior. The
religiosity scale has belief, ritual and knowledge dimensions, which were used to
measure the involvement of an individual in a particular religion.
Descriptive statistics, intercorrelation of variables, analys is of variance,
stepwise regression and Scheffe's multiple comparison tests were applied to analyze
the data.
The findings of the study revealed that, home-reared children are more
altruistic than institutionalized children, which in turn are more altruistic than street
children. Females are more altruistic than males. In addition to this, the older and
high-grade level children are more altruistic than the younger and low-grade level
children. More over, the more religious children are more altruistic than ch ildren
with low religiosity.
Finally, awareness education to the parents, trainings to the caregivers of
children's institutions and reunification of street children by concerned bodies are
recommended to improve the altruistic behaviors of children.
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Altruistic Behaviors of Home-Reared