Pin-Fenn Chou
Department of Business Administration, Far East University, Tainan City, Taiwan
Abstract
There is an expectation for the university students who go abroad before their graduation. Most students choose foreign tour locations for their trip travel place. There are many kind of disease for relevance tour; however, the knowledge about infectious diseases by the students’ perception will be affecting their attitude and prevention behavior.
The purpose of this study is to explore the students to participate in the graduation trip and understand to diseases’ knowledge, attitudes, and behavior; and to discuss the causal relationship between the three. The findings all support the study of hypothetical reasoning. Results found that the knowledge affects the attitudes and behavior, respectively; and the attitudes affect the behavior.
Keywords: Knowledge, Attitudes, Behavior
Motivation and Aim
To hold the graduation trip, are the most college students looking forward to things. In recent years, there are convenient transportation, travel television program to reported, and the network information to developed, which can rapidly to pass on the overseas tourism-related messages. According to the above, to cause many associate graduates of universities are attraction to choose the overseas tourist as their graduation trip.
However, many infectious diseases were to spread and to affect the country’s flourishing tourism. Despite the many national has been a number of major infectious diseases occurred, but they may be to lack of relevant experience and knowledge of the disease, caused the epidemic situation to outbreak. So, the students if choose to travel go abroad, who should have enough the knowledge of infectious diseases abroad, then to do their preventive behavior to reduce the chance of infection. Thus, the aim of this study as following:
To discuss the cause relationship is among knowledge, attitude, and behavior.
Review Literature
Infectious disease, it refers to kinds of infectious disease are pathogens or their toxins secreted directly invade, or indirectly through animal or vehicle invade the body, then to occurrence the disease. Factors affecting the distribution of infectious diseases in six categories, such as following:
- Ecological to Changes
Ex: the factor of global warming is caused by land use way to changed.
- Human factors
- The prevalence of international travel and business
- Factors of technology and business operation
- bacterial variants
Ex: producing the resistance to the action of a drug
- The collapse of public health measures
Spreading of infectious diseases, not only affect people’s health, but also the economic will be affected in the countries. Particularly, depend on the tourism as the major income for the country, if the cause of infectious diseases was to spread and to result in the tourists reduce to visit, that will have a significant impact on countries’ income.
The model concept of knowledge, attitudes, and behavior (KAB) by Allport (1935) proposed. This mode is described healthy behavior as a mode, the theoretical is based the personal get the relevant behavior information, then to occurs the reaction with a consistent of their attitude and behavior.
Heck et al. (2003) were use the model of KAP to investigate the infectious disease research in tourists of European. The results found that the most respondents do not understand the behavior of high-risk areas for malaria and to adopt the measures prevention. This reason may be these tourists choose their travel destinations are almost low-risk country areas. Hamer and Connor’s (2004) study, is also to survey the knowledge and attitudes of health issue about travelers’ trip. In the United States the passengers age of over 18 to go abroad , there are 64% passengers did not to seek travel health to advice; among of them, there is over 42% of passengers due to they did not understanding the travel-related health knowledge.
Research Method
This study use the questionnaire to investigation, that items were depend on the literature and according to the situation of infectious diseases to modify. There are 20 items revised questionnaire to measure knowledge, attitudes, and behavior. To measure are taken five-point scale. To measure the knowledge items were from 1 = very unaware, to 5 = very aware. To measure the items of attitude and behavior were from 1= very disagree to 5= very agree.
The research hypotheses are as following:
H1. There is a significant relationship between knowledge and attitude relevant disease.
H2. There is a significant relationship between knowledge and behavior relevant disease.
H3. There is a significant relationship between attitude and behavior relevant disease.
Empirical
In this partly, this model will be empirical the model that after tested the reliability and validity. For reliability, the Cronbach’s α value were 0.91, 0.69, and 0.66 in knowledge, attitude, and behavior constructs, respectively. Although the Cronbach’s α value of attitude and behavior lower than 0.7, however, they were reached the accept threshold. Then the model empirical analysis, the indicators were χ2/df = 2.26，CFI=0.92，GFI=0.90，AGFI=0.87，RMR=0.05，RMSEA=0.07. These indicators were reached the accepted threshold level.
In addition, the values of CR and AVE were tested. The values of CR were 0.91, 0.80, and 0.78 in knowledge, attitude, and behavior constructs, respectively. The values of AVE were 0.50, 0.50, and 0.48 in three constructs knowledge, attitude, and behavior, respectively. Although the AVE was not reached 0.5 for threshold in behavior construct, the model still can called the accepted model.
Further, the hypotheses were tested. By the path analysis, the results reported that the knowledge affects the attitude (p=0.00), and presentation a positively and significantly. The H1 was supported. The knowledge also had a positively and significantly to affect the behavior (p=0.00). So the H2 was supported. The attitude affects the behavior, the result indicate that a positively and significantly (p=0.00). The H3 was also supported.
Conclusion
The main purpose of this study was to understand the students of university if choose to participate in graduation trip they for perception disease knowledge, attitudes, and behavior. And also to test the causal relationship between the above three constructs. The results to confirmed that the students conception the knowledge of the disease, were to affect their attitude and behavior; and also the attitude also to affect behavior.
Reference
- Allport, G. W. (1935). Attitudes. In C. M. Murchison (Ed.), Handbook of Social Psychology. Winchester, MA: Clark University
- Hamer, D. H. and Connor, B. A. (2004). Travel Health Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices among United States Journal of Travel Medicine, 11(1): 23-26.
- Herck, K. V., Castelli, F., Zuckerman, J., Nothdurft, H., Damme, P. V., Dahlgren, A. L., Gargalianos, P., Rogelio, L. V., Overbosch, D., Caumes, E., Walker, E., Gisler, S., Steffen, R. (2004). Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices in Travel-related Infectious Diseases: The European Airport Survey. Journal of Travel Medicine, 11(1): 3-8
International Journal of Research (IJR) 