Perceptions of Health: a Developmental Trend in Indian School Children

Abstract

The potential for children to be used as agents of change in health research and practice is being increasingly valued. To reach this objective, it is foremost to gauge children’s perceptions about health, based on which future pathways to health promotion programs may be built which are easily comprehensible to children. Therefore, this study was conceptualised to understand the way school children perceive health and track the changes in their comprehension of health. Basing on a cross-sectional design, a sample of 667 children belonging to Class 6 to 10 from three different Indian schools were selected. These children having similar socioeconomic status and education curricula were asked to respond to an open-ended question—What do you understand by ‘being healthy’? The obtained qualitative data were analysed by means of content analysis to explore categories or themes of responses. Divergence of conceptualisation was measured through calculation of entropy. The three emerged major themes—Meaning of health, Ways to be healthy, and Indices of health— represented children’s health perceptions. The entropy values revealed a steep rise in the divergence in perceptions of health of Class 10 children compared to plateau in perceptions of children of lower classes. Implication and limitations of this study were also discussed.