[Peer education's effects on preventing accidental injuries in middle school students].
OBJECTIVE
Discuss peer education's effects on averting accidental injuries among middle school students.


METHODS
Randomly select 48 classes from 4 middle schools in Jiujiang city on March, 2006. Take 24 classes, total 1236 students as the experimental group (peer education group), the other 24 classes, 1320 students as the control group by usingsimple random sampling. The experimental groups adopt peer education, the control groups don't apply any intervention. Questionnaire is used to carry out field survey before and after intervention, questionnaire contents include general demography characteristics, knowledge and attitude about accidental injury, incidence rate of various injuries and precaution methods and so on.


RESULTS
Correct rate of accidental injury knowledge questions increases greatly in experimental group ( > 70% for each question) after peer education, correct rate of six questions in control groups is under 60.0%. Injury rate decreases from 51.92% to 28.61% after peer education. Before peer education injury causes are mainly sport (39.8%) and car (29.2%) accident. Injuries due to sport and fighting diminish remarkably after peer educations. Accident location also changes, before intervening, injury mainly happens in school (52.2%), after peer education home injury ranks the first.


CONCLUSIONS
Peer education plays a important role on preventing accidental injuries in the middle school students.
Wang
Xin
X
Division of Social Science and Public Health, Jiujiang University Medical College, Jiujiang 332000, China. wangxin_0072@sina.com
Zhu
Yuhua
Y
D000056:Accident Prevention / Q000379:methods*; D000293:Adolescent; D002648:Child; D002681:China; D005260:Female; D006266:Health Education / Q000379:methods*; D007722:Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010379:Peer Group; D012572:School Health Services / Q000458:organization & administration; D013334:Students; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014947:Wounds and Injuries / Q000517:prevention & control*