https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7282-0521
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ABSTRACT
Background
The role of universities in health promotion has been strengthened by institutional policies and the Health Promoting Universities movement. Together they seek to identify behaviours that are harmful to the health of university students and implement programs or interventions to promote the health of students within the physical environment of universities. However, the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly increased the number of students learning by distance. Under these circumstances, there is an increased need to assess the knowledge, attitudes and health practices of students in distance learning.
Objective
To develop a KAP (knowledge, attitude and practice) questionnaire on the health of distance learning students.
Methods
Development was carried out in four stages: 1) literature review to identify existing health programs in universities; 2) formulation of questions based on WHO theoretical frameworks, National Health Promotion Policy and the literature review; 3) selection of interdisciplinary expert judges and submission of the KAP-Health questionnaire for analysis of appearance, efficiency/consistency, clarity/understanding, pertinence of content and sequence of items; and 4) content validation by applying the content validity coefficient (CVC).
Results
The mean CVCs obtained were all equal to or greater than 0.96, 0.95 and 0.93 for the Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices domains, respectively; all comfortably above the cut-off score of 80% (CVCt = 0.80).
Conclusions
At this stage of the study, the judges consider the content of the KAP-Health questionnaire adequate to identify issues related to the health of students in distance learning. However, it is important to note that the next step is to test the usefulness of this questionnaire. We believe that our KAP-Health instrument is both original and useful for planning institutional policies in order to implement assertive strategies to promote the health of remote-learning students in Brazil and in other parts of the world.
Responsible Editor
Maria Emmelin
Responsible Editor
Maria Emmelin
Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful to ICETI - Cesumar Institute of Science, Technology and Innovation for the scholarship awarded to the researchers, and to Peter Grimshaw for the invaluable help in translating this article.
Author contributions
Conceptualization of the study and development of the methodology: JBH, MUY, MPB; Data collection: JBH, ATR, JVK; Data analysis: MUY, JBH; Manuscript writing: MUY, JBH; Manuscript reviewing and editing: JBH, MUY, MPB. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Ethics and consent
Ethical approval was obtained from the Ethics Committee of Universidade Cesumar protocol number 4.557.617 (24/02/2021).
Paper context
The acceleration and expansion of distance education in the world education system has brought new challenges to universities as health promoting agents. In order to understand the aspects that affect the health of students in distance learning, the KAP-Health questionnaire was developed to assess the knowledge, attitudes and practices relating to the health of these students, enabling the identification of the issues that affect their health and, thus, helping to strengthen the institutional educational policies of universities.