Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics
Original ArticleSurvey of Health Attitudes and Behaviors of a Chiropractic College Population
Section snippets
Survey Development
We surveyed age and sex demographics, as well as height/weight. Aside from height/weight, which was collected as interval-level data to allow us to calculate body mass index (BMI), all other survey queries were posed as either categorical (eg, student term as 4 categories, age as 6 categories) or dichotomous (eg, yes/no) survey items.
Response Rates
Of the 279 hand-delivered surveys, 258 were returned for an overall response rate of 92%. By group, survey response rates of students (94%) matched that of faculty (94%), but only 81% of staff returned their surveys.
Demographics and BMI
As reported in Table 1, 62% of our respondents were male, and most respondents (73%) were younger than 34 years old. Body mass index is calculated as weight in kilograms divided by the square of height in meters. The BMI was calculated for each participant based on his or her
Discussion
Chronic diseases are epidemic in modern society. Poor diet and insufficient physical activity have been estimated to have contributed to 400 000 deaths in the United States in 2000.2 We compiled information pertaining to the BMI of various groups within the campus community. Figure 1 is a histogram that shows a frequency distribution of BMI ranges among our survey participants. We found that 15.1% of the participants were obese. It has been estimated that 14.7% of residents in the San
Conclusion
This study indicates that students, faculty, and staff at this chiropractic college campus generally place a high level of importance on both educating patients and role modeling healthy behaviors to patients. We attempted to determine if the members of the campus community “walk the walk” in terms of living a lifestyle that is consistent with healthy behaviors and, in general, found that to be true in terms of our low rates of smoking, obesity, and inactivity relative to those of the general
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