High school student's knowledge and attitude about AIDS- Ferdows 2008

AIDS is considered a worldwide outbreak and also its incidence in Iran is increasing so it should be controlled that it requires increasing the level of awareness, especially in teenagers and youths as a risky group. So this study was done to determine their knowledge and attitude about AIDS to gain required information for suitable planning to increase the knowledge and attitude In this cross-sectional, descriptive-analytic study 384 students of Ferdows high schools (4 schools’ high school and high school boys’ 4) were selected by multi-layer clustering sampling. Data were collected by a questionnaire include personal information, 30 questions about knowledge, attitude. Content validity was confirmed. Data were analyzed by T test, Chi square and one tailed variance analysis. Findings showed that mean age of the students was 16 years, 50% of the students were female and 50% were male. 268 (69.8%) of the students were under 16 years and 98 (25.5%) were between the age of 17-16 years and 18 students (4.7%) were older 17. The frequencies of students in good, moderate and weak level of knowledge were 49.7%, 40.6% and 6.9% respectively. In the ranking of attitude level, most of the students (83.6%) had good attitude while 16.4% had weak attitude. There isnt significant relationship between knowledge and gender (P=0.07), attitude and parent's educational level (P=0.2). There are relationships between knowledge and age (P=0.03), knowledge and parent's educational level (P=0.001), knowledge and information source (P=0.001), attitude and sex (P=0.02), attitude and information source (P=0.01), attitude and age (P=0.03). Regarding to the findings it should be to consider schools as the main focuses of strategies for reducing AIDS. And education of students about all aspects of the HIV/AIDS, as part of supplementary education seriously should be paid attention by the educational policy makers and state.