Family Type And Physical And Mental Health Amongjn-School Female Adolescentin Ado Ei(Iti, Nigeria

ABSTRACT

Physical and mental wellbeing is one of the major part of health which may contribute to the increase or decrease of illness, disability and death of adolescents. Several research conducted on adolescent wellbeing revealed that family types and its characteristics have positive and negative influences on the health of adolescents. Although, different studies have been conducted on adolescent health h1 different family contexts, adequate attention has not be given to mental and physical well-being of adolescents in Nigeria. This study examined the relationship between family type, other family-related and personal characteristics and the self-reported physical and mental health of in-school female adolescents in Ado Ekiti, Nigeria. The source of data was a structured questionnaire that contained a scale for measuring self reported physical and mental health of in-school female adolescents. The sample size was 421 in-school female adolescents within the ages of 10-19 years. The uni-variate result revealed that female adolescents in Ado-Ekiti, Nigeria, commonly live in monogamous families, had good physical health and poor mental health The bivariate analysis showed that there was significant relationship between family type and physical health offer male adolescents (x2=8.8972, p=0.012), while there was no significant relationship between family type and mental health of female adolescents (x2=3.7805, p>0.05). Other family-related and personal characteristics such as school, age, class, religion, skill acquisition, number of siblings, parents;. education and occupation do not significantly relate to physical health of adolescents except ethnic origin (x2=4.6867, p