Locational Variation in Knowledge and Attitude about AIDS among Adolescent Students

The epidemic of Human Immuno Deficiency Virus (HIV) infection and Acquireo Immune Deficiency Syndrome is a global health problem of extra ordinary scale and complexity. The number of people living with HIV has risen from around 8 million in 1990 to 33 million today, and still growing. Since there is no suitable medicine or vaccine against AIDS till now, health education is the only available means to control its spread. Hence, it may be necessary to know the basic knowledge attitude towards AIDS education before any health education programme is launched. The study aims to focus on locational variation in knowledge and attitude towards AIDS among adolescent students of West Bengal. A total of 800 adolescent students were included from rural, urban, industrial and metropolitan area (200 from each area) of West Bengal and surveyed using “5-Point Likert Scale” consisting of two parts – Part-I for measuring knowledge and Part-II for measuring attitude. The data were collected in the middle of 2010 and analyzed using SPSS computer programme. The results revealed that adolescent students of different locations were knowledgeable about AIDS education and significant differences were existed among them. But, only rural adolescent student shows unfavourable attitude towards AIDS education and there was no significant difference between industrial and metropolitan group of adolescent students.