The Knowledge and Attitude Regarding the Health Effect of Smoking among Secondary Level Students in Nepal
Keywords:
Adolescents' Smoking, Health effects, Knowledge and Attitude, School childrenAbstract
Adolescent smoking is a serious problem all over the world. This study, carried out among all adolescent, secondary level students of Nava Arunima Secondary School, Kathmandu, is a cross sectional and quantitative work. Data were collected during January-February 2015 with the help of semi structured and pre-tested questionnaire. The self-administered interview was taken from the study participants. Finally, descriptive statistics, simple tabulations for univariate analyses and chi square tests for bivariate analyses were done.
               More than 59 % of the students had inadequate knowledge about the health effects of smoking. More than 61% of the respondents had a view that peer group influenced the adolescents to begin smoking and almost 30% of them had already experienced smoking. They viewed that smoking could be controlled by either teachers (45%) or the guardians (43.2%). Nearly 93% had understood smoking as an addictive behavior and 96% knew that it mostly caused lung cancer. They opined that making people aware about health effects of smoking on cigarette packets is a good policy (53%) and told smoking should be banned in public area (85%). Almost 59% had inadequate knowledge about the effects of smoking and statistical association was found between level of knowledge and use of mass media (p=0.006). However no association was found between level of knowledge with age (p=0.729) and gender (p=0.338). The Likert scale measured the attitude that they strongly agreed for - smoking being a disgusting behavior (79%), restriction of smoking in public place (85%) and making non smokers as a friend and disagreed with the idea of relaxation due to smoking (73%) and smoking being a personal matter (58%).
               Since mass media has greater influence in increasing level of knowledge against smoking, the awareness programs through this medium would be the most effective to reduce smoking initiation among school going adolescents.Â
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