Eating Habits, Physical Activity, and Their Associated Factors among Vietnamese School Children

Abstract

The purposes of this study were to examine eating habits and physical activity and determine association between eating habits and physical activity, and study factors, including age, gender, weight, years of study, mothers’ education and family income among Vietnamese school children. Sample included 227 school children currently studying in grade 3-7 in primary and secondary schools children in Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam. Stratified random sampling was used to recruit the sample. Data were collected from February – April 2012. Research instruments contained the demographic information form, the eating habits and the physical activity questionnaires, which their internal consistency reliability of .80 and .82 respectively. Data were analyzed by using descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation, t-test and one-way ANOVA. Results revealed that mean total score of eating habits was 31.18 (S.D.=5.08), and of physical activity was 10.31 (S.D. = 2.82), which could be implied that the sample had high health eating habits while it had moderate healthy physical activity. There were significant correlations between eating habits and child age (r=-0.22, p=5,000.000) (t=-4.05, p<.001 and t=2.87, p<.01). The results also showed significant differences of eating habits and physical activity over the differences of the child’s years of study (F=4.97, p<.01 and (F=2.67, p<.05). In addition, eating habits of the sample with different mother’s education was significantly difference (F=28.86, p<.001). These finding suggest that nurse should promote and encourage older and heavier school children as well as children with different family income, years of study and mother’s education to have better and more appropriate eating habits and physical activity.

Keywords

• Eating habits
• Physical activity
• School children
• Vietnam