Effects of Communication Knowledge set on the topic of Health Behavior Changing (Food, Exercise, Emotion, Smoking and Alcohol Cessation) to Line group application among Village Health Volunteers at Bangplama District, Suphanburi Province

Abstract

Line Application is the fast-forwarding communication technology with no additional services cost in sending pictures, voices, and information. It can be used as a knowledge sharing mechanism among village health volunteers, especially in the new normal or changing in our way of life. This quasi-experimental research with a two-groups pretest-posttest design aimed to examine the effects of communication knowledge set on Health Behavior Changes (Food, Exercise, Emotion, Smoking, and Alcohol Cessation) via Line application group chats. The study was conducted among 103 village health volunteers using a purposive sampling technique which two sub-districts were designated by simple random sampling method. Thus, 57 village health volunteers from Wat-Dao sub-district participated in the experimental group, whereas for the control group, 46 village health volunteers were selected from Pai-Kong-Din sub-district. The experimental group was designed to learn communication knowledge set for 21 consecutive days. Data analyses using descriptive statistics and t-test were reported as follows:

1. The most participants were female (89.32%), aged more than 45 years old, married, with high school level or vocational certification, no medical condition, no smoking and alcohol consumption. The results showed the perceived similarity between the experimental and control groups related to their characteristics, health conditions and health risks.
2. After applying communication knowledge set on Health Behavior Changes via line application group chats on mobile phone, the participants in the experimental group got significantly better mean scores on the posttests of both health knowledge and health behavior changing (p < 0.05), whereas the control group got a better score only on health knowledge.
3. After using communication knowledge set on Health Behavior Changes via line application group chats on mobile phone, there were significant differences between the experimental group and the control group on the posttest knowledge scores with significantly different at 0.05, but no different significances were found in health behavior scores for both group.
4. The assessment of self-rated on the quality of communication knowledge set among village health volunteers in the experimental group was reported a high level of satisfaction and perceived health benefits related to Health Behavior Changes (food, exercise, emotion, smoking and alcohol cessation).

Thus, the communication knowledge set should be informed to all organizations for conducting appropriate health management programs among village health volunteers and/or applying to people in the community to promote health knowledge and changing health behaviors for better health outcomes and wellbeing.