1Assistant Professor, Department of Community Medicine, S.V. Medical College, Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh, India
2Assistant Professor, Department of Community Medicine, Apollo Medical College, Khammam
3Assistant Professor, Department of Community Medicine, Mamata Medical College, Khammam
4Senior Programme Manager, Training Division
5Senior Programme Manager, Health System Support Unit, Public Health Foundation of India, New Delhi, India
*Corresponding author: Shankar Reddy Dudala, Assistant Professor, Department of Community Medicine, S.V. Medical College, Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh, India. Email ID: drshankarreddy@rediffmail.com, Ph.no: 09963589333
Online published on 27 May, 2015.
Television viewing is a boon/bane is an ongoing controversy. Though it is an important current area of research, studies in this aspect are limited. To fill up the lacunae in the current knowledge in this regard, the present study has been undertaken with the following objectives.
To study the television viewing habits among high school children, to know the beneficial and harmful effects of television viewing.
450 children in between 13 and 15 years of age, of both sex, studying in different schools were selected by simple random technique. Information was collected in a prestructured proforma by interview method. The data thus obtained was subjected for analysis by using appropriate statistical tests.
Out of 450 children 251 were Male and 199 were Female. Average time for TV viewing was 1.96 hours ± 1.0/day with a range from 1 to 6 hours/day. Headache (12.6%), eye strains (11.5%), sleep disturbances (10.8%), neck pain (0.4%), nail biting (8.6%), etc were the health disturbances due to Television viewing.
Duration of TV viewing had direct role in causing headache and eye strain; but it had no significant effect on sleep disturbances and school performance.
Headache, Programmes, Eye strain, Social Mixing
