Health Literacy and Obesity Health Behaviors among Primary School Students
Keywords:
Health Literacy, Obesity, Primary School StudentsAbstract
This mixed-method research aimed to study health literacy and obesity health behaviors among primary school students. The random sampling involved 104 primary school students (from 703 students) who are obesity. The tools used in this study were demographic data, health literacy, and obesity health behavior questionnaires. The overall reliability of Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of health literacy questionnaire was .86, while cognitive skill (KR-20) was .82, and Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of obesity health behavior was .80. Descriptive statistics were used for quantitative data analyzing. Qualitative data involved 20 purposive informants from the representatives of primary school students, teachers, and health care providers. Content analysis was used for qualitative data analyzing.
The result revealed that the overall scores of health literacy among the primary school students were at the level of insufficient (65.39%). Moreover, 63.46 percents of students had the overall scores of obesity health behaviors at the fair level and 34.62 percents of their scores was at the poor level. Three main themes from qualitative data reveals as follow: 1) Perceiving obesity is risky but unable to avoid, 2) Imbalance of eating and exercise, and 3) Lack of accessibility to valid information regarding health
Recommendations of the study results, the health promoting hospital and school should be used as guideline in develop program to improve health literacy skill including: understand health information, accessing information and services, communication to increase health skill, self-management and media-literacy. The program and activities should be implemented to train the students to balance between eating and excising in controlling an obesity health behavior.
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