Social Correlates of Deviant Behavior among Teachers in Public Secondary Schools in Nairobi County, Kenya.

International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) | Volume VI, Issue I, January 2022 | ISSN 2454–6186

Social Correlates of Deviant Behavior among Teachers in Public Secondary Schools in Nairobi County, Kenya.

Magdalene Mwele¹, Virginia Nyagah (PhD)², Simon Kangethe (PhD)^3
1,²Department of Psychology, the Catholic University of Eastern Africa
³KCA University

ABSTRACT
Globally, deviant behavior is found to be a social challenge which has created different problems in the present society. With respect to school setting, the behavioral deviancy of teachers has attracted considerable attention of researchers and educationalists. This study therefore assessed demographic correlates of deviant behavior among teachers in public secondary schools in Nairobi County, Kenya. The study was guided by Self-determination theory and Transactional Models. The survey research design was adopted for the study. The target population was 2387 comprising of 2291 teachers. A total sample of 385 participants were selected using simple random sampling technique. Data were collected using modified workplace deviance scale and social correlates questionnaire. Data was analyzed using univariate analysis, and Pearson correlation analysis. From the findings teachers deviance had the highest on the sabotage domain (mean=3.0429; SD=1.09429) while the subscale of gossip had the lowest mean (mean=2.9898; SD=1.13283). On social correlates, workload had the greatest contribution to deviant behavior (mean=2.3507; SD=.86610) while responsibility had the lowest contribution to deviant behavior (mean=2.0442; SD=.73774). The findings indicate that teachers’ workload had high impact on their deviance behavior. This implies that education stake holders ought to engage teachers on the area of workload in order to define the appropriate optimum work that teachers should hold. This will help in reducing deviance and improving productivity.

Key words: Teacher deviance, Social correlates, sabotage, workload

INTRODUCTION

Deviance in learning institutions remains an important issue to educationists and other scholars globally. This phenomenon has been widely researched but most of the studies are skewed towards learners. However teacher deviance research is gaining momentum as an area of interest for many researchers. For instance, Khan (2017) study on teachers’ deviant in the University of Peshawar found that level of teachers’ deviant behavior was above average. The study indicated that teachers showed favoritism, wasted time during teaching, took longer breaks, used verbal abuse, did not follow the course content as well as provoking students’ against other teachers.

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