Abstract
Injury is a leading cause of death in the children and adolescent populations. In particular, more than 80% of unintentional injury was related to risk-taking behaviors involved in diverse accidents around school and home. Therefore, educational approaches should be provided for children and adolescent populations, and schools are the essential and appropriate sites to conduct safety education. This study was conducted to identify injury prevalence and safety education at schools among middle and high school students in Korea. About 1,034 middle and high students in 28 schools participated in a self-administered survey. The target schools were selected from the stratified random sampling method throughout schools of seven metropolitan cities in Korea. The questionnaires were delivered to the vice-principals by ground mailing service and the vice-principals administered survey data collection. The questionnaire asked about safety education provided in schools, injury experience in the last year, needs for injury prevention class in school, and demographics. All survey responses were entered into SPSS worksheet. Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) and descriptive discriminant analysis (DDA) were used in statistical analysis with SPSS software 11.1. Multivariate analysis of variance was conducted as a preliminary analysis of DDA. According to the result of multivariate analysis of variance, gender (man), grade (poor), living with both parents, and displaying injury prevention messages on school news board were significantly different between the injured student group and the uninjured student group (p= .00). These four factors also had significant effects on students' injury experience in DDA, although correlation of the four factors with injury experience was weak overall based on their canonical function coefficients. All structure coefficients of the four factors were greater than .30, which means the four factors have discriminant effects on injury prevalence. The sizes of the discriminant effects, in order, were largly from gender, grade, living with both parents, and safety message display on school news boards.