WATER HYGIENE KNOWLEDGE, ATTITUDE, PRACTICE AND ENHANCEMENT STRATEGIES AMONG WOMEN ATTENDING ANTENATAL CARE IN PLATEAU STATE, NIGERIA. A RESEARCH TOPIC ON HEALTH AND KINETICS
Abstract
In some cases in Plateau State, water was got from source closest to the user irrespective of its quality. Moreover, fetched water was mixed with stored one, which is troubling and point to problems among others. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the water hygiene KAP of women attending ANC in Plateau State and the outcome used to proffer water hygiene KAP enhancement strategies. To achieve the main purpose, the study determined water hygiene KAPof women attending ANC in Plateau State using ten research questions and six hypotheses tested at 0.05 level of significance. Descriptive survey research design was used for the study. The population for the study consisted of 150,913 (all the women who attended ANC in Plateau State in 2014). The sample size for the study was 777 drawn from the population using multi stage sampling procedure. Two types of instruments (WaHKAPQ & WaHESQ) used for the study were validated by five experts from the Department of Human kinetics and Health Education and Measurement and Evaluation, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. The Cronbach Alpha reliability index of WaHKAPQ was .80 and WaHESQ, .89. The research questions were answered using descriptive statistic of frequencies, percentages and means. The Chi-square statistic was used to test all the null hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The findings of the study revealed that majority (61.6%) of women who attended ANC possessed correct knowledge regarding water hygiene, water collection (75%), water source protection (74.8%) and water transportation (74.2%) while more than half of women possessed correct knowledge regarding water storage (58.3%) and about half of women possessed correct knowledge regarding PoU of water (49.2%) whereas over 30 per cent of women possessed correct knowledge regarding water purification (37.1%). Also, more than half (56.4%) of women expressed positive attitude regarding water hygiene while majority of the women expressed positive attitude regarding water source protection (76.7%) and water storage (70.2%) whereas over one half of the women displayed positive attitude towards water purification (58.5%), water transportation (51.8%) and PoU of water (50.5%) while 30.6 per cent of women expressed positive attitude regarding water collection (30.6%). Also, the finding showed that women attending ANC practised:
