Comparison of Health Perception and Health Anxiety Levels of Sociology and Medical Students

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: It is important to know medical students' perception and anxiety who confronts patient-disease concepts every day. Because, physicians' health perceptions are creating healthy living behaviors for them, affecting the process of helping and understanding their patients. This study aimed to compare first three grade students of the faculty of medicine and sociology thus determining the health perception and health anxiety levels in two university examples. METHODS: In this cross-sectional, descriptive study, Faculty of Letters, Department of Sociology and Faculty of Medicine's volunteer students took a questionnaire including demographic questions, Health Perception Scale (HPS) and Health Anxiety Scale (HAS). For statistics frequency, percentage, mean, independent t-test, One-way Anova and correlation tests were used. p<0.05 was considered significant. RESULTS: In the study, 345 questionnaire forms were evaluated. The mean age was 19,84+-1,69, which included 107(%31)sociology students, 235(%68)women, 87(%25) of rural origin, and 259(%75,70) of middle income. Mean HAS and HPS scores were 50.17 +- 5.66 and 17.59 +- 5.78. Medical students HAS score (49.41 +- 5.62) was significantly lower than sociology students' score (51.86 +- 5.41) (p= 0.000). The mean HPS for medical and sociology students were 17.97 +- 5.63 and 16.74 +- 6.05, respectively. High in medical students but not significant (p=0.068). Although mean HAS scores differ significantly between genders (p=0.019), HPS scores doesn't (p=0.206). DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: Significantly lower perception of health of students studying in medical school, health anxiety, though not significant, is important, and further research is required.

Keywords

• health perception
• health anxiety
• medicine
• sociology
• student