A Cross-cultural Assessment of Knowledge, Attitude, and Practice on COVID-19 among People of Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey

Abstract

Objectives: The success or failure of global and national efforts to combat the COVID-19 pandemic depends on public knowledge, attitude, and practice. Iran, Afghanistan, and Turkey are among the most affected countries in which they have approximately similar socio-cultural structures. This is an online questionnaire-based cross-sectional study to assess the knowledge, attitude, and practice levels toward the COVID-19 pandemic among the adult population of these nationalities. Methods: A total of 2736 individuals including 1080 from Turkey, 1025 from Iran, and 631 from Afghanistan responded to the questionnaire. The data was collected online through a survey using the Google form and Porsall platforms. In addition to demographic characteristics, the questionnaire consists of three main sections including items of awareness, attitude, and practice of the participants about COVID-19 using four Likert scale questions. Descriptive statistics were used to estimates the proportions of items. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and independent T-test was used to analyze the difference between KAP scores among sociodemographic variables and between countries. All analyses were done with the 95% confidence level and the significant level was defined as p-value < 0.05. Results: Overall KAP scores were over 3 out of 4 among Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan respectively. Despite no differences between subpopulations in each country, the overall attitude and practice score of the Afghan population was significantly lower than Turkish and Iranian populations (P-value<0.05). Conclusion: In spite of the high level of knowledge, positive attitude, and acceptable practice in all populations understudy, a low-risk perception in a considerable part of the population was discerned. J Microbiol Infect Dis 2021; 11(2):58-65.