A Comparative Study of Perceptions of Runaway and Homeliving Children

Syeda Mehreen Zahra^1,

¹Lahore Garrison University, Department of Applied Psychology, Lahore, Pakistan

Cite this paper:
Syeda Mehreen Zahra. A Comparative Study of Perceptions of Runaway and Homeliving Children. American Journal of Applied Psychology. 2015; 3(4):100-108. doi: 10.12691/ajap-3-4-4

Abstract

The study explores the perceptions of runaway and home living children on five domains of family, school, self, future and world and also studies the difference between the two groups on these five domains. Data was collected individually by administration of a sentence completion test. The test was developed during the process of this research keeping in mind the characteristics of runaway children. The sample consisted of 80 boys of age 12-16 and 40 children were taken from Runaway and 40 were taken from Home living group. The sampling strategy adopted for data collection was Convenience sampling. Chi square and frequencies were calculated to analyze the results. The significant values of chi square indicate that there is a difference between the perceptions of runaway and home living children. Furthermore the results of distribution of frequencies show that runaway children have negative perceptions on these five domains as compared to home living children. Findings of the present study are effective for reducing the runaway behavior of children by working on the perceptions of children especially on these five domains.

Keywords:
perceptions family school self future world

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