Open AccessUniversity Students’ Knowledge, Attitude, and Practice (KAP) towards COVID-19 in Malaysia
Author(s) -
Zur Batrisyia Mohd Zubir,
Abd Rahaman Yasmin,
Rukman Awang Hamat,
Hayati Kadir Shahar
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
pertanika journal of social science and humanities
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.165
H-Index - 12
eISSN - 2231-8534
pISSN - 0128-7702
DOI - 10.47836/pjssh.29.4.41
Subject(s) - covid-19 , positive attitude , descriptive statistics , medicine , family medicine , cross sectional study , limiting , psychology , veterinary medicine , disease , social psychology , pathology , infectious disease (medical specialty) , mechanical engineering , statistics , mathematics , engineering
Covid-19—associated with the human-to-human transmission is recent medical concern which also associated with public health concerns. A cross-sectional online survey was conducted among clinical year veterinary and medical students studying in a university in Malaysia to determine the students’ knowledge, attitude, and practice towards COVID-19. The questionnaire consisted of 4 sections, namely, socio-demographic characteristics (6 items), knowledge (14 items), attitude (10 items), and practice (24 items) towards COVID-19. The collected data were subjected to descriptive statistics, Mann-Whitney U, Kruskal-Wallis H, and Spearman’s correlation analysis. A total of 219 students participated in this study, and they consisted of 52.1% and 47.9% of veterinary and medical students, respectively. The total scores were categorised into poor ( 80%) based on Bloom’s cut off point. Overall, the students acquired high knowledge (80%), moderate attitude (76%) and high practice (86%) against COVID-19. In the attitude section, the veterinary student scored significantly higher than medical students (U=3791, p= .001), and female students scored significantly higher than males (U=3183, p= .001). The analysis revealed a statistically significant association between attitude and practice (P< .05) despite no association between knowledge to attitude and practice variables. Overall, the results indicated that both veterinary and medical students had high knowledge with moderate to high attitudes towards COVID-19. Thus, they were practising good preventive measures in limiting the spread of the disease.