Abstract:
Altruistic behaviouris characterised by acts that benefit other individuals other than oneself.There are various studies among children and adults on motives of altruism.Thecurrent study aimed to investigate the factors influencing altruistic behaviouramong emerging adults. A total of 141 participants aged between 18 and25 yearswereselected usingmultistage cluster samplingmethodamong undergraduateand graduate students at the United States International University, Africa (USIU-A). The Self-Report Altruism Scale was used to collect data. A Chi-Square test of independence was carried out using SPSS®version 25to examine the factors influencing altruistic behaviour. Sixfactors were examined to investigate if they influenced altruistic behaviouramong emerging adultsincluding age, gender, presence of religious belief, number of siblings, year of study and group size.The results showed that age [ݔଶ(90)=119.990,=0.019]andpresence of religious belief [ݔଶ(90)=126.951,=0.006]were found to influence altruistic behaviourin emerging adults. The study concluded that age and religion are influential factors ofaltruistic behavioural tendencies among emerging adults. Altruismin this study increase by age from 18 to 25 years and there were no gender discrepancies the current study compared to prior research, thus future studies could target a wider scope of emerging adults to discover the altruism trend.
