KAP and main objective of KAP Essay

The Knowledge, Attitudes and Practice KAP survey was developed in 1950, to assess knowledge, attitudes and practices in the field of family planning and population. More recently, KAP surveys are widely used to gather information from people in particular areas on specific conditions and this collected data was then used for planning and implementation of public health programs. In the 1960s, KAP surveys started to be used for understanding knowledge, behaviours and perception among African populations. From that time, several studies used the protocol and this technique grew rapidly in the field of health science to investigate health knowledge, attitudes and practice among population groups (Launiala, 2009 1,2). Knowledge, attitudes and practices studies indicate what people know about certain things, how they feel and how they behave. This protocol focuses on three topics Knowledge, Attitudes and Practice (Vision 2020 1).
K knowledge possessed by a community refers to their understanding of any given topic or a set of understanding in this study the knowledge needs to generate about refractive errors and childhood eye care services to assess the extent knowledge of schoolaged children about refractive errors, eye health care and the barriers for accessing eye services. A Attitudes the second part of the KAP protocol the term attitudes are used to refer to a person's general feeling about an issue, object or persons. Attitudes are not directly observable as practices. For example, in this study, the researcher planned to assess attitudes of schoolchildren towards eye health and feeling about spectacles wear. However, measuring attitudes by KAP has been criticized because some people may tend to give an answer, which they believe to be corrected or more generally acceptable particularly in sensitive topics (Muela, Ribera & Nyamongo, 2003 4). P Practices are the observable action in response to a stimulus. The questions related to practices in a KAP questionnaire are usually about the use of preventive measures or different health care option (Muela, et al. 2003 3, 4). The main objective of KAP survey in this study is to assess needs for information, education and communication for schoolaged children from 12 to 17 years in South Darfur State of Sudan. Furthermore, the questionnaire focuses on eye health care specifically on what schoolchildren know about uncorrected refractive error, what they think about wearing spectacles. Moreover, what they do if they have signs and symptoms of poor eyesight. The information gathered from this study was essential to help in the development implementation of a childhood eye plan care in South Darfur State of Sudan.
3.2.2 Study design
A knowledge, Attitudes and Practices (KAP) survey is a quantitative method that provides access to quantitative and qualitative information the main aim of these surveys are to assess misconception, or misunderstandings that may represent barriers to the activities that need to be implemented and are also useful in all stages of project cycle such as diagnosis , programming, implementation and evaluation. This study was a crosssectional schoolbased survey using a semistructured questionnaire for knowledge, attitudes and practices. T