Life Skills Of Youth In Chennai Slums

Abstract

Slums are universal in character and no country is able to get rid of them. Large-scale migration to the cities due to employment opportunities and other community facilities, an income level which is inadequate to maintain decent standards of living are some of the major contributory factors responsible for the growth of slums especially in Chennai as per Tamilnadu slum clearance board. Life Skills have been defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as psychosocial abilities for adaptive and positive behavior that enable individuals to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life. The youth from slums due to lack of effective utilization of their skills are still in a lower level jobs and have not climbed to great ladders. The youth pursuing their graduation or pursuing their post graduation belonging to the age group between eighteen to twenty four years of age from Zone 8 slum recognized by the slum clearance board alone are the respondents. Strength of thirty samples by using simple random sampling method was used for the research. A majority 73.3% of the respondents were in poor condition level in self awareness dimension, while 26.7% of them were in average level. It is inferred that the respondents various life skills from different dimensions namely interpersonal relationship, critical thinking, decision making, problem solving and coping with emotions do differ with regard to their gender. It is observed that there is strong and significant association between various dimensions of life skills namely Interpersonal relationship (X2-4.562,df-1), Effective communication (X2-1.425,df-1) and Critical thinking (X2-4.124,df-1). The research suggests the need for bettering the life skill education among the youth from slums at the time of their academics itself