Child-to-parent education: a pilot study.

A controlled study carried out in the hilly Konkan region on the West coast of India showed that school children have the potential for transmitting their newly acquired knowledge to their parents. Though the results indicate that acquisition of knowledge does not mean a change in attitudes concerning leprosy, child-to-parent education may show promising results in leprosy education in developing countries where most parents of school children are illiterate and are not easily reached by conventional methods of health education.

PIP: Alternative methods for educating illiterate parents may provide an option for health education. In this study of leprosy knowledge, 283 children 11-15 years old and 550 parents were queried about leprosy causes, curability, contagiousness, and disease symptoms in Raigad district, Maharashtra state, India. Health education on leprosy was taught to one group of children; another group discussed hygiene, sanitation, and oral rehydration within the same day for 10 bi-weekly sessions. Pretests and posttests were administered and parents were asked about the source of their information. The sociodemographic characteristics of both control and study groups were the same. The findings indicated that children in the pretest were similar in their knowledge and attitudes about leprosy. In the posttest children in the study group had improved knowledge of leprosy, which was not statistically significant, and little change in attitudes. Parents showed a significant improvement in their knowledge about leprosy which was not evident in the control group. 18.4% of parents indicated their child as a source of information in the posttest and did not identify their children in the pretest as a source of information. In the pretest and posttest, 15% of parents reported knowledge from posters and slogans and 20% from health personnel. Control group children showed marginal improvement in their posttest scores, which shows information was shared between children. Attitude change did not accompany knowledge change, which could reflect the short exposure to the new information. A promising result was that school children may be a potential vehicle for reaching an older illiterate population not easily reached by conventional health education programs.

Socio-psychological study of the prostitutes.

Only 8 percent of the prostitutes were literate. Income per night varied from Rs 10 to Rs 30 for 72% of the prostitutes. Whereas only one third of the married women were happy with the profession, 95.92% of Devdasis liked the profession. Illiteracy, domestic unhappiness, deception, destitution, poor socio-ecomic status of parents, and religious custom of Devdasi were the important contributory factors for landing innocent girls or socially handicapped women into prostitution.