A Diagnostic Study of safety education in elementary schools based on PRECEDE Model

PRECEDE 모형을 이용한 일부 초등학교 안전교육의 진단적 연구

As the complexity of the our environment is further complicated by advancements in industry and increase in vehicle traffic flow, the incidents of injury causing accidents are on the rise. Consequently, there is increasing emphasis on the importance of systematic and continual safety education for injury preventive behaviors. This study investigates safety related problems of elementary school students based on the PRECEDE model, proposed by Green et al.(1980 Green), to comprehensively identify the requirements of school safety education. The identified requirements were used to diagnose the current state of elementary school safety education through the analysis of multidimensional factors. A questionnaire survey was conducted on 594 sixth grade students from randomly selected 4 schools in Seoul to examine their injury preventive behaviors and to determine the educational diagnosis variables that affect it. The duration of the survey was 3 weeks starting from April 12, 1999 to May 8, 1999. A summary of the survey results are presented below; 1. Situations in which accidents have occurred were, in their order of frequency, ‘during play or sports activities within the school grounds’ was most frequent at 59.6％, ‘during play on local streets’ at 49.5％, and ‘traffic accidents’ at 41.6％. 2. Categorization of the injury preventive behavior showed that ‘not playing at high traffic flow locations such as streets and construction sites’ had the higher level of observance, while ‘wearing of helmets and joint protection devices during playing’ was least observed. 3. Considering injury preventive behaviors in relation to educational diagnosis variables indicated, for predisposing factors, lower ‘perception to injury accidents’ (p〈0.001) combined with higher ‘concerns for injury accidents’(p〈0.001), ‘practice of preventive behavior’(p〈0.001), and ‘the level of safety knowledge’(p〈0.001) resulted in significantly higher observance of injury preventive behaviors. For enabling factors, higher ‘perceived level of the school safety education’ (p〈0.001) and ‘availability of safety education resources’(p〈0.01) indicated significantly higher observance of injury preventive behaviors. For the reinforcing factor, frequent exposure to ‘safety education brochure’ (p〈0.01) and ‘audio-visual material for safety education’(p〈0.01) combined with more ‘regional safety education’ (p〈0.01), ‘home safety education’ (p〈0.01), ‘school safety education’(p〈0.001), and, ‘parents’ observance of preventive behaviors' (p〈0.001) showed significantly higher observance of injury preventive behaviors. 4. An analysis of the factors that affect injury preventive behaviors showed that the enabling factor ‘awareness of school safety education’ had the highest correlation with injury preventive behaviors followed by factors, in their order of significance, ‘practice of preventive behavior’, ‘perception to injury accidents’, ‘level of safety knowledge’, ‘parents’ observances of preventive behaviors', and ‘concerns for injury accidents.’