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Television viewing habits and their effects among high school children in the urban field practice area of mamata medical college
Authors: Raghotham Reddy K1, Sashidhar B2
Number of views: 367
Background: Television viewing is a boon/bane is an ongoing controversy. Though it is an important current area of research, studies in this aspect are limited. To fill up the lacunae in the current knowledge in this regard, the present study has been undertaken with the following objectives. Aims: To study the television viewing habits among high school children, to know the beneficial and harmful effects of television viewing. Settings and Design: Khammam Town, cross sectional study. Methods and Material: 450 children in between 13 and 15 years of age, of both sex, studying in different schools were selected in Khammam town by simple random technique. Information was collected in a prestructured proforma by interview method. The data thus obtained was subjected for analysis by using appropriate statistical tests. Statistical analysis: Data was statistically analysed by using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). P value <0.05 was considered to be statistically significant. Results: Out of 450 children 251 were Male and 199 were Female. Average time for TV viewing was 1.96 hours ± 1.0 /day with a range from 1 to 6 hours /day. Headache (12.6%), eye strains (11.5%), sleep disturbances (10.8%), neck pain (0.4%), nail biting (8.6%), etc were the health disturbances due to Television viewing. Conclusions: Duration of TV viewing had direct role in causing headache and eye strain; but it had no significant effect on sleep disturbances and school performance.