Impacto del nivel de conocimientos, la fuente de información y la experiencia con la enfermedad sobre las actitudes, creencias, conocimientos y emociones asociadas a la diabetes en un grupo de estudiantes de educación secundaria

Abstract

The present study was designed to establish the knowledge, beliefs, attitudes and emotions associated with diabetes in a healthy, young sample with different experience with the illness. Six hundreds of students of 4th grade of secondary obligatory education took part in the study. They were recruited from nine educative centres randomly selected during an academic year. The age of the participants ranged from 15 to 18 years old (M
= 15.62, sd = 0.70; 50.8 % women). The Cuestionario sobre Diabetes (CSD; Vázquez and Cruz, 2004) was administered in collective applications. This questionnaire was designed for this study in order to evaluate in adolescents the above mentioned variables. The participants showed some level of knowledge regarding the illness, although it was not exhaustive, and, in general, they showed positive beliefs and attitudes towards
the disease, as well as certain emocionality regarding the fact of suffering from it. The source of information, the experience with the illness and the level of knowledge of the participants exerted a relevant influence on the attitudes, beliefs and emotions associated with this illness. These results must be taken into account due to the impact that these variables can exert on the preventive and therapeutic behaviors of healthy persons and patients, as well as on the supporting behaviors aimed to ill people.