Oral Health Knowledge and Practice among Secondary School Students in Enugu East Local Government Area, Enugu State

Abstract

The study assessed oral health knowledge and practice among secondary school students in Enugu East local government, Enugu State. A was adopted on a population of 19,307 secondary school students. A sample size of 540 students was drawn using multi-stage sampling procedure. The instrument used for data collection was a researcher-developed Knowledge and Practice of Oral Health Questionnaire (KPOHQ), which was face validated by three experts The internal consistency of the instrument, was established using Kuder Richardson (KR-20) for knowledge of oral health and Cronbach’s Apha Method for practice of oral health which yielded a reliability coefficient of 0.73. Frequency and percentage were used to analyse and answer the research questions, while chi-square statistics was used to test the null hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance.. The results revealed that, secondary school students possessed high knowledge of promotive oral health (55.8%) as well as high practice of oral health (59.3%) among the secondary school students. There was no significantly associated in the level of knowledge of promotive oral health and gender was significantly associated with the practice of oral health. Based on the findings, the authors recommended among others that since the students had high knowledge of promotive oral health and high practice of oral health, measures should be taken by both teachers and public health educators to encourage the students to sustain the knowledge and practice of oral health