Assessment of the Health Risk Behavior in Young Adulthood: A school-based Health Study in Kirkuk City - Iraq

Abstract

Background: Many adolescents‘ health problems are predominantly caused by risky behaviors which contribute to the morbidity and mortality in this age group. The adverse health consequences of these behaviors have been recognized as important public health issues.
Objective: The aim of this study was to assess the rates of some health risk behaviors among male students of four secondary schools in Kirkuk city and to find out association of factors with those risk behaviors.
Methods: We designed a cross-sectional study. A self-administer questionnaire to collect the data from students of four secondary schools from Januarys 10th, 2016 to July 10th, 2016. 278 students were chosen randomly out of 1000 males' secondary school students.
Results: Violation of safety behaviors were the most commonly found in our study:   52.5% of the students were  in a vehicle driven by alcohol drinking person, almost  half of them never wore a helmet (51.1%) followed by a habit of texting message while driving (48.9%).  Feeling sad and hopelessness were recognized in 40.6% of our study population followed by cigarette smoking (29.1%), physical fighting (24.5%), violence (15.8%) and alcohol drinking (7.6%) respectively. The least common risk behavior is drug abuse (0.4%). There was a significant association between age and alcohol drinking, safety and tobacco, also a positive association between weapon carrying and physical fighting with various indicators of substance use.
Conclusion: The highest health risk behavior among all male students in secondary schools in Kirkuk City was safety. This study suggests that prevention efforts aimed at high-risk youth during early adolescence need such a multi-problem focus, because this co-occurrence of problem behaviors is already evident among junior high school students.