Effects of Health Literacy Promoting Program for Pesticide Usage of Cassava Farmer , Soeng Sang District, Nakhonratchasima Province

Abstract

At present, most of all farmer are still using pesticides to produce high yields, which are
not aware of the health problems associated with these chemicals. This research was a quasiexperimental design to test the Effects of Health Literacy Promoting Program for Pesticide
Usage of Cassava Farmer, Soeng Sang District, Nakhonratchasima Province. The sample was 68
farmer aged between 18-59 years, that was divided into experimental and control groups, each
group was 34 farmers. Both groups were examined for cholinesterase in blood before and after
the experiment. The experimental group received the health literacy promotion program that
included lectures on knowledge, group discussion, watching short films that produced by the
researcher, knowledge display, finding a modeling of using pesticides accuracy and safety. Data
were analyzed by using descriptive statistics. Such as percentage, mean, standard deviation,
maximum and minimum scoreand analytical statistics by using independent t-test and paired
sample t-test with a statistically significant at 0.05 level.
The results showed that after intervention, the experimental group had higher mean
score of knowledge towards the use of pesticide enemies plants in cassava farmer than those
before the experiment significantly(p<0.001). When comparing the mean score between the
experimental group and the comparison group showed that the experimental group had higher
mean scores of health literacy than those the comparison group significantly (p< 0.001). These
were consistent with the results of cholinesterase test in blood that the safety level were
increased.