Psychological maltreatment and its relationship with self-esteem and psychological stress among adolescents in Tanzania: a community based, cross-sectional study
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Date
2019
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BMC psychiatry
Abstract
Background: Despite the growing recognition of childhood psychological maltreatment as a public health and
human rights concern, it remains rampant in developing countries including Tanzania and has a negative impact
on the victim’s self-esteem during adolescence. There is a lack of published studies in Tanzania that examine the
relationship between childhood psychological maltreatment and self-esteem during adolescence. This study
describes the relationship between childhood psychological maltreatment and self-esteem and psychological
distress among adolescents in Tanzania.
Methods: This was a cross-sectional, community-based study of secondary school students that was conducted
in randomly selected secondary schools in five regions in Tanzania between April 2016 and February 2017. A
multistage cluster sampling technique was employed to obtain the required number of study participants. The
Rosenberg self-esteem scale, Kessler psychological distress scale (K10) and Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ)
questionnaires were used to measure the variables in the study. Pearson correlation analysis was used to analyse
the correlation between variables (Psychological maltreatment and self-esteem and psychological distress).
Results: A sample of 1000 secondary school students was recruited for this study, of which 553 (55.3%) were males and
447 (44.7%) were females. The mean age at presentation was 16.45 ± 6.42 years. Out of the 1000 participants, 766 (76.6%)
experienced psychological maltreatment. Emotional abuse was reported in 24.7% of the participants, while emotional
neglect was reported in 51.9% of cases. There was a strong positive correlation between psychological maltreatment and
self-esteem (r= 0.55, p < 0.001), whereas the correlation between psychological maltreatment and psychological distress
was significantly but weak (r = − 0.086, p = 0.007). The results also show a strong positive correlation between
psychological distress and self-esteem (r = 0.16, p < 0.001).
Conclusion: Finding from this study demonstrated that childhood psychological maltreatment is prevalent in our setting
and is associated with psychological distress and low self-esteem during adolescence. Urgent intervention targeting at
reducing occurrence of childhood psychological maltreatment is necessary to reduce the incidence of low self-esteem
and psychological distress among Tanzanian adolescents.
Keywords: Psychological maltreatment, Self-esteem, Psychological distress, Adolescents, Tanzania
© The Author(s). 2019 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to
the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver
(http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
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Keywords
Psychological maltreatment, Self-esteem, Psychological distress
Citation
Mwakanyamale, A.A. and Yizhen, Y., 2019. Psychological maltreatment and its relationship with self-esteem and psychological stress among adolescents in Tanzania: a community based, cross-sectional study. BMC psychiatry, 19(1), p.176.