Levels of Public and Higher Education in Health Promotion in the Light of Focus Group Studies

Abstract

Health is considered an upgrade value by The WHO Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion (1986), so we study the institutional role of these “upgrade values” from different points of view like roles, interests and representatives. We make our research both in the public and higher education also in the national and international field. In our comparative study we analyse the processes of the higher education in the context of the participants and we outline the conceps of the students. We made two focus group interviews with those students who took part in daily physical education and in their first year in the University of Debrecen and the University of Nyíregyháza. Each focus group contained 15 students who represented their own institutions. They also had to compare their health behaviour and sports practice in secondary school and university. Our research questions focused on the will to do something for health awareness (Pikó, 2002). We were curious about how the forms of developed health behaviour change entering the higher education and what the main motivations of health development are. Our results show that the students of both universities highlighted the institutional infrastructure, the teacher’s attitude and most importantly the social effect of daily physical education.

Keywords

• health improvement
• public education
• higher education
• daily physical education