A Study on Knowledge on Breast Feeding of College Students by Their General Characteristics

The breast feeding habits of 507 college students were evaluated between March 27 to April 26 (2006). Data were collected from self-administered questionnaires and analyzed using SPSS for Windows V.12.0. The study population consisted of 245 (48.3%) male and 262 (51.7%) female college students that answered ‘yes’ when asked whether they had been breast feed. A total of 52.7% of the study population were fed with breast milk (most frequent answer), as opposed to 11.0% that were fed with infant formula (least frequent answer) during their infancy. When asked whether they ever got educated on breast feeding, 78.1% of the college student subjects answered ‘no’. A total of 95.1% of the female college students replied ‘yes’ when asked if they intended to breast feed their child. Moreover, 62.2% of the college student subjects indicated that their parents had an influence on their decision to breast feed. A comparison between male and female college students indicated that female college students had a superior knowledge level of the general characteristics of breast feeding over the male subjects (p<0.05) . Moreover, a comparison of the different levels of college attained suggest that freshman college students had the highest knowledge level, followed by senior, sophomore and junior college students in terms of advantage, BF Tabu (p<0.05). Also, students provided with education on breast feeding had a higher knowledge level than college students with no formal education. In summary, the results suggest that the knowledge on breast feeding in college students were different by general characteristics such as gender, major and school year, and education on breast feeding in advance was appeared to be an important factor, therefore nutritional education course on breast feeding is recommended for the college students.

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