Knowledge, attitude and practice of cervical cancer screening among female students in tertiary institution in Calabar, Nigeria
International Journal of Development Research
Knowledge, attitude and practice of cervical cancer screening among female students in tertiary institution in Calabar, Nigeria
Received 12th October, 2018; Received in revised form 26th November, 2018; Accepted 14th December, 2018; Published online 30th January, 2019
Copyright © 2019, Ojong Idang Neji, Nsemo Alberta David and Eno Esther John. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Cervical cancer is one of the commonest cancers in Nigeria. Fortunately, it is preventable by detecting precancerous lesions early through the use of various screening tools. This screening can be possible if students are aware of the problem and also if they have positive attitude. Therefore, this study was conducted to find out the knowledge, attitude and practice of cervical cancer screening services amongst female students in University of Calabar, Cross River State. Three specific objectives and two hypotheses were formulated to guide the study. The study design was a descriptive survey design. Stratified and simple random sampling technique was adopted to get the 171 sample size that was used for the study. The instrument for data collection was a four sectioned questionnaire, and a reliability coefficient of 0.68 was used. Simple percentage and frequency table was used to analyzed the data, while chi-square was used to test the hypotheses. The findings in this study revealed that, 83.6% of female students had good knowledge of cervical cancer screening, 67.8% had favourable attitude, while only 14.6% practiced cervical cancer screening. Hypotheses tested, revealed that no significant relationship existed between the level of knowledge and attitude towards cervical cancer screening and also, no significant relationship existed between the year of study and practice of cervical cancer screening, where x2-calculated of 0.67 and 0.058 were lesser than x2-critical of 5.991 and 5.991 respectively at 0.05 level of significance. Based on the above, it was recommended that female students should be encouraged on the need to practice cervical cancer screening and also that government and non-governmental organizations, private investors should invest more into the health sectors by providing equipments and materials necessary for the provision of these services in all health facilities and at an affordable price.
