Health promoting programme among high school students

The result of the baseline survey

Abstract

Introduction: Nowadays the leading causes of death are cancers and cardiovascular diseases, which are determined mostly by unhealthy lifestyle. In order to reduce burden of diseases and prevent these diseases, it is important to get the routine of healthy lifestyle early in the juvenile, on which the school may have the greatest impact in addition to the family. Therefore, the aim of our research is the development of a health promoting program among high school students in order to help them to lead a healthy lifestyle. In this article the results of the baseline survey, as the first step of this process, will be presented.
Methodology: Our study population contain 9th grade students of a high school in Hajdú-Bihar county, the baseline survey was carried out during the autumn of 2016. Our survey consists of a self-administered health and behaviour questionnaire, a test aimed to measure the healthy lifestyle-related knowledge, and a nutritional status measurement. During the data analysis, the chi-square and Fisher exact test, ANOVA and in the case of the non-normal distributed continuous variables Kruskal-Wallis test were used in order to investigate the differences between the different types of institutions at the high school.
Results: 130 students participated in the study, from them 33.9% were in high school, 36.9% in secondary school and 29.2% in vocational school. Our survey revealed that there is a difference between the behaviour and knowledge among students from different types of institutions. The students in vocational training consumed more sweets (p = 0.034) and soft drinks (p = 0.001), were more inactive than their counterparts (p = 0.001). The high school students spent the least time with computer use on weekends (p=0.013), the proportion of regular smokers (p<0.001), the lifetime prevalence of drunkenness (p=0.009) and the proportion of those who already have sexual intercourse (p=0.001) was the lowest, while they reached the highest average score on the knowledge test (p=0.011).
Conclusions: These initial results help to plan and develop the program, since the topics of the program will be chosen based on them and the existing differences in the knowledge of the students will also take into consideration during the sessions.