Social Adjustment Challenges of First-Year Students: Peer Influence, Misuse of Freedom, Ignorance of Life Skills Management, Living in Anxiety and Guilt

Introduction

This chapter introduces the reader to the social adjustment challenges that the first-year university students face and the strategies they adopt to mitigate the challenges so that they fit well in their university life. The emphasis on this chapter is on the adjustment to social challenges. The information in this chapter was obtained from the four cluster groups of 5first year students drawn from the department of education (coded as EFG) made up 5 students; 5 law students (LFG); 5 sociology students (SFG) and 5 psychology students (PFG) who voluntarily participated in the focus group discussion. The interview guide was designed by the researcher and was semi-structured. Thus, even though it had three major questions concerning the challenges of adjusting to personal-social challenges, its effects and coping strategies of the freshmen, other questions were asked depending on the responses given by the participants. Document analysis was adopted as the research methodology. The search engines such as Google Scholar, Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC), Web of Science, Psych INFO, Science Direct, and JSTOR were used to obtain secondary data. Peer- reviewed journal articles were also used to obtain the secondary data on the challenges of social adjustment to the university life. The data analysis was carried out thematically for ease of narration. The chapter is sub divided into Five themes namely; the social challenges, effects of these challenges and the strategies to address the identified challenges for adjustment.