Abstract
A person's capacity to carry out everyday tasks and interact with others in ways that are satisfying to them and to others, as well as to meet the needs of the community in which they are living, is reflected in their psychosocial functioning. Thus, it is important for adolescents to have a healthy psychosocial functioning as it has an impact on their growth and development as evolving individuals. The COVID-19 level 5 and 4 lockdown had negative implications on the psychosocial functioning of school going adolescents as their lives rapidly changed. There are limited studies on the impact of the lockdown on adolescents especially in the South African context. The aim of the study was therefore to investigate the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown on the psychosocial functioning of school going adolescents.
Underpinned by the ecological systems theory, the study was qualitative in nature. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews. The data collection instrument used was a semi-structured interview schedule. The initial schedule was used in the pilot study to check whether the data collection instrument would give the study rich, tangible and relevant data-no changes were implemented on the tool after the pilot as it provided the required data to address the research objectives. A Thematic framework used to analyse and present the findings whilst the phenomenological research design was followed for the study. The findings of the study indicated that the school going adolescent’s psychosocial functioning was impacted adversely because of the COVID-19 lockdown. This was attributed to the restrictions of the particular lockdown as the adolescents were unable to live their normal way of life. The adolescents were not doings things they enjoyed such as seeing their peers, playing, going to school, etc as these contributed to healthy psychosocial development. Most of the participants experienced challenges which affected their mental wellbeing such as high depression and anxiety levels. Other factors such as their family members losing employment, changes in lifestyle because of financial constraints and not being able to bury their loved ones due to the restrictions of the COVID-19 level 4 & 5 lockdown also had negative implications for the adolescents normal psychosocial functioning.
The study contributed to scarce literature on the implications of the lockdown on adolescents psychosocial functioning. The findings from the study can confirm that being social, and interacting within all systems involved in the chronosystem, macro system, exosystem, mesosystem and micro system plays a huge role on the school going adolescents’ psychosocial functioning. With a disruption in their lives and not being able to fully participate and interact within all these systems as per norm because of the COVID-19 restrictions, their psychosocial functioning was subsequently impacted negatively.