La Educación para la Salud: Un Modelo de Evaluación Psicológica.

Abstract

Aim: to prepare and study a questionnaire enabling the measurement of the student's food habits in the third (two-year) cycle of primary education.<br/><br/><br/>Amongst other aspects we have presented a programme of Education for Health, for students of 5th and 6th year of Primary Education, concentrating on the aspects of DIET AND CONSUMPTION<br/><br/><br/><br/>Work hypothesis:<br/><br/>· The questionnaire guarantees internal and external validity as well as reliability and temporal stability in measuring the areas covered by the study.<br/>· Determining the categories providing the information to attain the aim of the research.<br/>· The number of items is sufficient to provide the information about the categories established to measure the fulfilment of each of the aims that were set.<br/><br/> <br/><br/>Verification of the hypotheses:<br/><br/>1. It has been possible to appreciate that the consistency of the construct is sufficiently well-argued. <br/>2. We have appreciated that the category and sub-categories have acted in a sufficiently descriptive way, and have always been sufficient to prepare the questionnaires in the different phases of the study. <br/>3. It has been observed that the categories of Food Habits, Healthy Diet, Fast Food and Sweets and Feeding Disorders and Hygiene habits have displayed the importance that the "judges" assigned these at the beginning.<br/>4. The aforementioned categories are seen to have a sufficient number of items that give validity to the questionnaire, stressing nevertheless that the Social Eating and Advertising and Food categories did not display the importance that the "judges" had assigned them. <br/> <br/>Conclusions:<br/><br/> To recommend to health professionals that Education for Health Programmes cannot be in any way discontinuous, like campaigns, as they cannot ensure the introduction of healthy conducts in the long-term. <br/><br/> To stress the need to carry out longitudinal studies to enable proving if healthy conducts are effectively being introduced.<br/><br/> The questionnaire should not only be an assessment tool providing a diagnosis of the school population as regards feeding habits, but should also be a proposal for different assessment tasks in Education for Health.