Abstract
The incidence of childhood obesity in Hat Yai District, has become increasingly
high and its effects are likely to worsen in the future. To control and prevent obesity
effectively by behavioral changes, various levels of control and factors are needed.
This quasi-experiment are two-group pretest-posttest non-equivalent control. The
main objectives of the study were to compare health behavior and weight loss among
secondary school students whose weights were higher than the standard body weights
before and after participating in the programs, and to investigate the results of the
programs in terms of policy of school administrators, school physical environments,
peer influence, health service systems, school food sellers program, overweight
students program, and parents and guardians program. The subjects consisted of
school administrators, school physical environments, peer groups, health service
systems, school food sellers, parents and guardians. The key subjects were male and
female secondary school students with body weights higher than the standard body
weights in Hat Yai District, Songkhla Province. There were 51 students in each group of
the control and the experimental groups. The behavioral change tools consisted of
administrative policy, physical environmental development, peer influence, health
service systems, parents program, food sellers program, and health behavioral change
program for overweight children. The experiment was from July 2014 to February
2015. The general data were analyzed with frequency and percentage, health
behavior and weights before and after the experiment were compared using Wilcoxon
Signed Ranks Test and Mann-Whitney U Test. Analysis was performed with qualitative
data on school administrative policy, physical environmental development, health
service system, and food sellers in the school.
The study found that after the experiment, the experimental group had a
higher level of health behavior in food consumption than the control group at a
statistically significant level of p<.05, the level of health behavior in exercise for the
experimental group was also higher than that for the control group at the level of
p=.05. The effects of the programs on weight loss revealed that the average of
ordinal scale for the experiment group decreased with a statistic significance of (p<
0.05) while that for the control group increased with a statistic significance of (p< 0.05).
The results of the study indicate that the health behavioral change program
improved health behavior among the overweight secondary school students, and
decreased their weights.
