Health and Nutritional Knowledge Assessment Scale for Workers in Cashew Industry

A major cause of malnutrition in our country is the lack of awareness regarding good nutritional and health practices. In order to chalk out any effective nutritional campaign, assessing the present level of knowledge is essential. Cashew industry employing a large section of the organized labour constitutes a significant segment of our working population. Hence, an assessment of their health was taken up with respect to their nutr itional status. In this context, the level of knowledge was also assessed after standardizing a scale. This paper explains the procedure of developing and standardising a knowledge scale tomeasure the level of awareness on Health and Nutrition of such a socio-economically backward group. The scale has been constructed by making use of the summative method to get a 5 point judgment on items selected after review of literature and also discussion with subject experts. The short list statements were subjected to item analysis to finally arrive at eight statements. The scale was administered on 200 respondents. It was found that majority of the workers (78.5%) had only moderate level of knowledge on Health and Nutrition. The scale was thus constructed and standardised and has proved to be reliable, valid and also successful in assessing the knowledge.