Research Developments in Arts and Social Studies Vol. 2

The study looked at the topic of artisanal tin mining and secondary school pupils' academic performance in the mining community of Barakin-Ladi vs Mangu, a non-mining community in Plateau State, Nigeria. The study's main goal was to look into the differences in students' performance in secondary school terminal tests like WAEC/NECO and tertiary entrance examinations like JAMB/UTME in Barakin-Ladi and Mangu. Relevant data was retrieved from 732 respondents in the two LGAs to meet these goals. The Taro Yamane method was used to determine the sample size. The respondents, all of whom were secondary school students, were chosen using a simple random sampling technique from each of the two LGAs. The study collected data from both primary and secondary sources. The data was analysed using quantitative approaches (basic percentage and chi-square). When compared to Mangu, where strong academic achievement was documented in WAEC/JAMB examinations, the data demonstrated a relationship between social dangers such as child labour and mining-related conflicts and low student performance in Barakin-Ladi. These conclusions were supported by a comparison of historical WEAC and JAMB results from the two research locations. The study reports that among other things, community-wide education about the dangers of artisanal Tin mining to schoolchildren and the enforcement of artisanal Tin mining regulations in Barakin-Ladi.

This research work was geared towards investigatingthe growing problems of Alcoholism and binge drinking among teenagers in Kenema city, Sierra Leone. Questionnaires and interview schedules were carefully developed and administered to 400 people randomly selected from various part of Kenema City. The sample size comprised of Teenagers, Traders, Housewives, and Community leaders such as Imams, Pastors, Teachers, elders and Medical Laboratory Technicians. The structured questionnaire was divided into four sections each soliciting information on the Demographic characteristics or Personal information of the respondent, determination of the causes of growing problems of alcoholism and binge drinking, assessing and examining the health status/conditions of these teenagers and toexamine the awareness of the danger of alcoholism.

The results of the research work indicated that 230 (57.5%) of the ages of 11 – 20 years of the youths were actively involved in alcoholism. With respect to the awareness alcoholism in the city 270 (67.5%) of respondents were aware of alcoholism the city and 130 (32.5%) had no knowledge of alcoholism. The Sawmill Section where alcohol was produced in the form of Bitter Root drink had the highest percentage (95%) within the Kenema city and with so many dwelling houses around the vicinity of the factory lot of health implications were envisaged by the inhabitants.

The responses on the health status those who take alcohol indicated that, hydrated condition accounted for 10 respondents with a percentage of 2.5%, dehydrated condition accounted for 271 respondents with a percentage of 67.7%, Anaemic condition accounted for 60 respondents with a percentage of 15% and Insane condition accounted for 59 respondent with 14.7% of the respondents in the study area. This means that taking alcohol is dangerous to our health system let alone in excess as our young brothers are now doing, the required percentage for alcohol in the system according to WHO standard is 4.5%, above that figure there is going to be a health problem. It was also shown that those who take alcohol in the research area are marginalized by the community members.

The purpose of this article is to highlight the role of the environmental factor and, in particular, education and socialization in shaping the social behavior of the individual and, more specifically, the aggressive and undesirable behavior. After the introductory reflection and the conceptual definitions, it aims, by invoking theoretical and empirical data, to document the dependence of the biological, linguistic, emotional, cognitive, and mental state and evolution of humans from their relative and non-relative environment. In this sense, an attempt is made to emphasise the role of education and socialization in the formation of the social entity and its characteristics these are used by humankind in the social management of communication and coexistence/symbiosis with their fellow human beings. The role of practices and experiences used by "natural and unnatural educators" in their daily communication with children is particularly emphasized, stressing that practices of violence create conditions for their adoption, repetition, and reinforcement. At this point emphasis is given on the crucial role of family, predominately, and of school, secondarily. These institutions play a very important role in acquiring children with values and practices that promote peaceful behavior and coexisting of people. School, in which systematic education and socialization is practiced, must be close to the needs and interests of the students, equipping them with perceptions and strategies of rational, democratic, and peaceful management of any type of communication, even conflict.

The erection of Hero Stones is common phenomenon in all over the world but the selfless act becoming a rare phenomenon in this current world. Hero-Stones were considered as symbol of Brave and Virtue of the folks in Ancient Tamilagam. It speaks about the virtue and value of the society. The folks of Ancient Tamil country were morally bind with the social welfare rights theory and they were ready to sacrifice their lives for the welfare of the society. Krishnagiri region is considered as the one of the important region in the erection of Hero Stones from ancient past. It is also considered as the primary source to construct the cultural history of this region. It speaks about the heroic action, culture, virtue, background and sometimes refers the political history also. So through this paper an attempt to care out the historical importance of this particular region. The places like Muthanur, Periabompatti, Kundani, Reddiyur etc. in this region are rich in Hero Stones and the detailed and exclusive study is need of the hour to carve out the glorious past of this region.

Teaching thinking for students is an important task of education and it should be started at the primary level. In many primary schools, however, this task was not paid much attention. Since 2018 all primary schools in Vietnam have implemented the reformed curriculum, which emphasizes the importance of teaching creative thinking for students at all grades. This paper describes a practical study to analyze the current status and causes in teaching creative thinking for primary students. In order to view the current status of teaching creatvie thinking  for last grades student in primary school the author conducted a survey at 6 primary schools in Thai Binh, Hanoi and Nam Dinh provinces in Vietnam with the participation of 145 primary teachers. Results of this survey showed that the ineffective development of creative thinking in primary schools is due to  teacher's unclear cognition of  creative thinking development  for students. Many teachers do not understand properly about the nature and characteristics of creative thinking of primary students  and they also have no effective measures to conduct creative thinking education for students.

The end of the Second World War was a serious problem of rehabilitation, not only for the country but also for the huge mass of veterans returning home after the military conflict. And in order to avoid the unrest and social tension that followed the First World War, the US administrations led firstly by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and secondly by Harry Truman were commissioned to design a specific plan for rehabilitation and reintegration to civilian life of veterans.

The “G.I. Bill”, officially known as the “Servicemen’s Readjustment Act" is a law that was passed in June 1944 in the United States, turning into the Public Law 346 with the aim of benefiting the American soldiers who were then still fighting in World War II.

The ultimate purpose of this law was to provide demobilized soldiers with a legal mechanism that would allow them to access the finance of professional or university studies together with a pension to help them with their livelihood for a period of one year. This law also gave the soldiers facilities to get loans to buy a home or even to start a business on their own.

Throughout this article we will focus our attention on the benefits that this act provided, in particular, to this group of veteran soldiers in the field of education as well as the impact that it had on the expansion of university or professional studies, especially after the return home of Second World War veterans.

Therefore, our objective shall be to analyse what repercussions the G.I. Bill had on the educational background of the American veterans after the end of World War II. Even though there does not seem to be a final agreement on the consequences that this law had for soldiers and American society in general, yet it has been recognized from several fields that the approval of this law led to a large number of veterans get a higher education that otherwise would have been near impossible to obtain.

While domestic workers in the city of Dar es Salaam are conceived as mostly young girls from villages outside the city, very little is understood about how the girls at their tender age, and limited experiences, manage to arrive in the city. Knowledge of how they are linked to employers in the city is also inadequate. Among the central objectives of the study upon which this article is based were to explore the means employed by the young girls to get to the city and to get linked to employers, and to investigate the nature of employers. Drawing on the migration network theory and aligning with the study findings, this paper reveals support from parents, relatives, drivers, conductors, and brokers as central modes of getting to the city. It also unveils informal employment agencies and brokers as significant means through which the young girls are connected to different employers. The author recommends prompt measures to curb different social networks that are used as the means of trafficking and employing young girls as domestic workers which also violate their rights.

Politics must adapt to the rapid changes in technology of today. The Revolutions of 1989 resulted in the demise of communism, leaving only a few countries claiming to be communist. But communism is just a name given to a centralised controlled system albeit with an inclusion of repulsion for religions. Following 1989, many countries continued to be totalitarian regimes with controlled acceptance of religion. As a result, the scene in 2018 is China, which still refers to itself as a communist country, becoming the world's second largest economy and European countries increasingly being centralised from Brussels. This has resulted in a massive resurgence in the acceptance of centrally controlled systems all over the world. This paper also examines politics within the context of currently accepted derivations from high technology, as well as the similarities between these and the ideas of the United States' Founding Fathers, who recognised that the successful economy of their newly formed British colony was clearly due to citizens being permitted to bloom their innate talents.

It is not news that the world came to a halt for about a year, and that we are now operating in a new normal. A substantial amount of research has been conducted on this subject.  There has been some disagreement on how the epidemic affected more than simply state economies and the health sector.  In many countries of the world, as a result of the virus and the lockdown that followed in the international community, there was a big rise in crime rates and sexual violence in states. This article investigates the rise of crime in Nigeria and how it impacted the country even during a pandemic. This study employs the case study technique to examine the spike in crime and how it occurred during a pandemic.

The primary goal of this study was to determine the association between test anxiety and academic achievement among undergraduate students. A total of 414 students were chosen at random from five departments of Freshman Engineering at MLR Institute of Technology in Hyderabad, TS, India. The Test Anxiety Inventory (TAI), developed and improved by Spielberger, was used to collect data. Data was analysed using Pearson correlation, multivariate English, and regression analysis. It was discovered that there was a significant negative relationship between test anxiety scores and student performance scores. The findings demonstrated that cognitive factors contribute more to test anxiety than effective factors. As a result, it is investigated that test anxiety is one of the major factors that results in students' underachievement and poor performance, but it can be addressed through rigorous training of individual students in relation to factors that have resulted in test anxiety. It is further suggested that the students should be fully informed by the faculty and administration of departments about the nature of courses, duration of the semester, and level of commitment necessary for the successful completion of the course. The students with higher test anxiety must be identified and treated in order to increase their academic achievement.

The paper examines the housing stock in the Obafemi Awolowo University staff quarters in Nigeria and identified the various house types and their accommodation details. Housing is regarded as one of life's basic necessities and a requirement for human survival on a global scale. In a similar vein, proper staff housing in a university has been shown to have a significant impact on the university system. It also investigates the demand for accommodation units and the actual number of applicants accommodated in the staff quarters within the next five years. For data collection, archival records, questionnaires, and interviews were used. Questionnaires were sent to the Secretary of the Housing and Allocation Unit and the Estate Officer of the Obafemi Awolowo University's Division of Works and Maintenance. Descriptive statistics were used to analyse the data. The research showed that the university had a diverse range of house types, with 732 houses in the university staff quarters. Despite the fact that no additional housing units were provided over the decades, there was an annual rise in the number of applications for housing, mainly due to security concerns and the benefits of on-campus amenities. From 2011 to 2014, the average annual demand for accommodation was 492 at the senior staff quarters (SSQ) and 136 at the junior staff quarters (JSQ). During the same time period, however, the average available accommodation in both the SSQ and the JSQ was approximately 23 and 2 units, respectively. The paper concludes that the demand for housing units in both the senior and junior staff quarters were very high. While the challenges of insecurity of life and accommodation within the university staff quarters, the available houses were grossly inadequate to cater for the yearly demand for shelter in the university community.

This study explored perceptions of social work students before and after a service-learning project in which they worked with clients with substance abuse issues. Two areas were explored: (1) social work students’ perceptions of treating clients with substance use before and after the course Addiction Treatment in Social Work and the required service-learning project component; and (2) social work students’ self-efficacy before and after the addiction, service-learning project. Data-collection occurred through a pre-post self-efficacy survey, a questionnaire about interests in working with clients struggling with addiction and a course assignment. Students also completed a demographic questionnaire. Data were analyzed using Dedoose for the qualitative data component and SPSS for the quantitative components. Overall, findings from both the quantitative and qualitative were very positive. Although there were no significant increases in self-efficacy from pre-post-test the average scores did increase nearly 3.5 points. Students also indicated they were more willing to work with both individuals and groups/families dealing with addiction issues. Moreover, students reported an increase in insight, skills, community engagement and meaningful experiences even though they reported having feelings of doubt initially. Based on the findings, specialized training, and service-learning opportunities in addictions for social work students is beneficial. Training should target appropriate skills, the distinct needs of people who are suffering from substance abuse disorders, and self-reflection regarding perceptions of substance use disorders.

Objective: The objective of this study is to provide a better understanding of the benefits of service-learning by providing student perceptions and evidence-based approaches to utilize service-learning as an educational approach.

Previous research suggested the possibility of establishing systematic links between some intrinsic features of a presupposition and textual functions that it can carry out with greater probability. This study starts from an organic analysis of the semantics of presupposition triggers, thanks to a lexical database comprising 19,500 entries. The database was used to investigate a corpus of chat conversations that included about 200,000 tokens, with the general objective of exploring possible pragmatic values inside bidirectional interactions, thereby verifying the effects on the audience and the negotiation of the presupposed content. In the corpus, triggers mainly occur as noninformative, maintaining information already known by all those participating in the communication; but, depending on their different features, some of them are systematically associated to a function of anaphora and textual cohesion, while others strengthen social conventions and stereotypes. The informative uses, although in a minority proportion, are the most interesting category, where the presupposed content corresponds to the 'New' in the Given/New dichotomy, thus generating a misalignment between what is actually implicit and what is conveyed as such. This misalignment appears to be an error in just a few cases and it corresponds to a low number of reader reactions: particular conditions in pragmatics and in the social context must be called into question to interpret the data.

The pandemic has led to several issues, such as long-term anxiety and distress, increased physical distance between people, loneliness and isolation, and loss of employment. In addition, there are concerns about an increase in suicides as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially among young people. In Japan, long-term trends in the number of suicides show an increase around 1955 (with the first peak in 1958), followed by a second peak in 1986, and a third peak in 1998. These findings indicate that the age at which people are most susceptible to suicide has changed over time, with the increase gradually shifting from the younger age group to the middle and older ones. Furthermore, the main age group that saw an increase in suicides during the first peak became the main group that saw an increase during the second and third ones. It can be inferred that, when young people grow up in social situations that lead to an increase in suicides, they may continue to be at high risk, even after reaching middle or old age. There is still insufficient evidence to support this inference; thus, further studies and data collection are needed. The objective of this chapter is to examine the effect of the psychological distress caused by the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health, specifically in terms of the increase in suicides, from a long-term perspective.