Nutrition Knowledge and Attitude Change of Students Studying in State and Private Secondary Schools

Abstract

The aim of this study is to analyse the changes in nutrition knowledge and attitudes of secondary school students depending on certain socio-demographic factors. The universe of the study is composed of 521 students, including 142 female and 379 male students studying in the secondary school and the sampling group in Konya province private and state central secondary education schools. The "Nutrition Knowledge and Attitude Scale", developed by Ertürk (2010), was used for nutrition attitude and knowledge and personal information form to acquire socio-demographic information. Descriptive statistics of the data were made, variance and homogeneity were tested, independent sample t test was used for binary comparisons, One Way Anowa was utilized for multiple comparisons, and Tukey test was benefitted to determine difference sources. Nutrition knowledge of students in state schools was found to be lower than that of students in private schools and this gap was identified to be statistically significant (P <0.05). Nutritional knowledge and attitudes of female students were determined to be higher than males’ and this difference was found to be statistically significant (P <0.05). Nutritional knowledge and attitudes of students who received elective nutrition classes were found to be higher than those who did not have nutrition classes and this change was again found to be statistically significant (P <0.05). The number of siblings and education status of parents were found to be statistically significant variants (P <0.05). As a result, the high level of nutrition knowledge and attitudes of female students compared to male students, the status and role of cultural transfer and social structure featured on male and female can be seen as the reason for that matter. It can be said that taking a nutrition class has a positive influence on nutrition knowledge and attitude, and that private school students have more nutrition knowledge yet similar nutrition attitudes with those in state schools.