Personal Characteristics and Health Literacy Affecting the Operational Prevention and Control of Dengue hemorrhagic fever among Village Health Volunteers Muang District in Khon Kaen Province

Abstract

This Cross-sectional descriptive research aimed to study personal characteristics and health literacy affecting dengue prevention and control operations among village health volunteers in Muang District, Khon Kaen Province. The population consisted of 6,009 village health volunteers. A sample of 220 participants was selected through Stratified random sampling. The research instruments were quantitative questionnaires validated by three experts with an Index of Item-Objective Congruence (IOC) greater than 0.50. The reliability coefficients were 0.71 for health literacy, 0.78 for dengue prevention and control operations, and 0.81 for the overall questionnaire. Qualitative data were collected through in-depth interviews with 12 participants. Data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics at a 0.05 significance level.

The results showed that the overall levels of health literacy and dengue prevention and control operations were high, with means of 2.51 (S.D. = 0.23) and 2.65 (S.D. = 0.21) respectively. Personal characteristics including gender, age, and duration of work as village health volunteers showed low correlations with dengue prevention and control operations (r = 0.166, p-value = 0.014) (r = 0.164, p-value = 0.015) (r = 0.212, p-value = 0.002) respectively. The overall health literacy showed a moderate correlation with dengue prevention and control operations (r = 0.492, p-value <0.001). Three independent variables-being female, media literacy, and communication skills-collectively predicted 25.2% of the variance in dengue prevention and control operations 7.6 (R² = 0.076, p-value <0.001).