Health Education Curriculum Constructs and Dimensional Properties for Korean Middle School Students in Multidimensional Scaling Analysis

다차원척도법을 이용한 중학교 보건교육 교과영역 구축 및 속성 분석

Background: School is a primary health education setting for adolescents and the continuous support should be provided to renew school health education curriculum correspondent to cultural changes in Korean society. Objectives: This study was conducted to identify the principals and teachers' health education needs for their students and to analyze their conceptual map for health education curriculum at school. Methods: The sample size of the preliminary study was 321 of the teachers in elementary, middle, and high school, and that of the main study was 355 middle school principals and teachers over the country. The self-administered mailing survey was conducted to collect the available health education topics in the preliminary study, to identify the factor structure of the health education topics and to analyze the conceptual properties on health education with exploratory factor analysis and multidimensional scaling analysis in SPSS 12.0. Results: A total of 21 health education topics were collected from the preliminary survey and 31 topics were, comprehensively, generated for the main survey. In exploratory factor analysis, seven factors were generated in 1.0 or greater Eigen value standard. The seven factors were 'life health promotion,' 'disease prevention and drug control,' 'bulling and aggression prevention,' 'injury and sexual harassment prevention,' human-efficacy and regulation,' 'health protection for adolescence,' and 'alcohol and tobacco control.' The educational need scores were the highest in 'human-efficacy and regulation' and 'injury and sexual harassment prevention.' The two-dimensional cooperates were generated for the 31 health education topics and the two dimensional properties which divided the conceptual space were 'health-safety' for one and 'public/environmental-individual/personal' for the other. That is, middle school principals and teachers primarily, understand the health education curriculum in the sense of 'health vs. safety' and 'public/environmental vs individual/personal.' Conclusions: Health education curriculum and textbook should be developed based on teachers' needs and conditions for health education in school fields. The field-based health education programs or textbook would make more possible problem-solving health education for youth in real school fields.