Effects of the Health Literacy Promotion Program on Health Literacy and Behaviors for Preventing Cannabis Use among Upper Primary School Children in Pathum Thani Province
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Abstract
This quasi-experimental study used a two-group pretest-posttest design and aimed to compare the school-aged children's health literacy and the prevention behaviors for cannabis use between the experimental group who attended the health literacy program and the control group who attended the usual program. The sample consisted of 58 students studying in grades 3 - 6 from a school in Patum Thani province. The multi-stage sample method was implemented for sample selection. The samples were divided into two groups using a simple random sampling method, with 29 students per group and were matched to have equal qualifications in grade level, gender, age, academic performance, and history of cannabis use. The research instruments for the experimental process consisted of: (1) The health literacy promotion program; and (2) The use of animation clip about “Interesting Facts of Cannabis”. The research instruments for data collection process consisted of: (1) The health literacy questionnaire in preventing cannabis use; and (2) The behaviors for preventing cannabis use. Three experts checked the content validity of the two instruments. The index of Item-Objective Congruence (IOC) of both questionnaires was 1. The instrument reliability was examined using Cronbach's alpha coefficient, which was 0.82 and 0.77, respectively. The differences in health literacy scores in preventing cannabis use and preventive behaviors before and after the experiment were compared using a paired t-test and between the experimental and control groups using an independent t-test.
The results revealed that the health literacy and the preventing behaviors scores of the experimental group during the posttest were significantly higher than the pretest (p < .05).
Based on these findings, it is suggested that the health literacy promotion program could be integrated to the health and physical education program or the school and community health promotion program to prevent and solve the inappropriate cannabis use of the school-aged children.
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