Abstract

This study was carried out to assess the psychosocial effects of insecurity among internally displaced persons in Benue State. The research design used for this study was a descriptive survey research design. Two research questions guided the study and two null hypotheses were posited and tested at 0.05 level of significance. The target population were the internally displaced persons (IDPs) living in Markudi and Guma camps of Benue state and they consist of 4,529 numbers of persons. Based on five percentage (5%) of the total population and Krejcie and Morgan formula (1970), samples size of 352 people was drawn from the population. This sample was drawn from Markudi and Guma camps of Benue state based on simple random sampling technique. A 20 item questionnaire was designed using the Likert scale model and validated by three experts, one in psychology and counselling, two in the Measurement and Evaluation, Michael Okpara University of Agriculture, Umudike. The reliability of the instrument was determined using test re-test method and data obtained was analysed using Pearson Product Moment Correlation and yielded a coefficient of0.85. This was administered to a simple randomized sample of 345 students drawn from a population of 2048 from two states of the study centre in the study area. All the research questions were analyzed using frequency and percentage while chi-square statistic was employed in testing the null hypothesis. The result showed 62.7% still isolated in the camp, 59.5% lost a family member during the attack which is a psychological effect of insecurity, 85.5% of the respondents think insecurity has brought poverty, with 73.1% not having all their food needs met which is a social effect of insecurity, a majority of the respondents 57.7% strongly agrecd that poverty is the factor responsible for insecurity. It is recommended that a critical assessment of the living conditions of the IDPs be done, also improved upon and the factors responsible f