Impact of Virtual Education on Obesity Knowledge, Attitude, and Practice

Abstract

Background: Obesity has been one of the most concerning world-wide health problems due to its increase in number every year. In order to raise public awareness, direct face-to-face education is one of the methods that can be implemented. Ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and government?s countermeasures, however, limit offline activities, driving people to use online educational platforms instead, which has not been explored as much. Therefore, this study aims to examine the impact towards knowledges, attitudes and practices of productive age-population after receiving virtual education regarding obesity. Methods: A quasi-experimental study was conducted to a group of productive-age-population in Surabaya, Indonesia. The population received an intervention through virtual education, and results were collected using a questionnaire, comparing the pre-test to the post-test results. Results: Results from 19 participants who met the eligibility criteria were analysed using paired t-test for knowledge and Wilcoxon signed-rank test for attitude and practice. Despite no significant differences in knowledge and attitude domains (p = 0.077; p = 0.640), the result shows a significant increase in the attitude domain (p = 0.038) after intervention. Conclusion: This study showed an improvement of attitude regarding obesity after receiving online education. However, the results were not the same in knowledge and practice domains. Therefore, further studies regarding the impact of online education method are necessary to confirm the current findings.