Knowledge on optimal breast-feeding behaviors and its relation with personal, educational and socioeconomic factors in postpartum mothers of the “Hospital Belen de Trujillo”

Abstract

The level of knowledge of five optimal breast-feeding behaviors and its relation with some personal, educational and socioeconomic factors in 245 immediate postpartum mothers taken care of in the Service of Obstetrics of the “Hospital Belen de Trujillo” was studied. The accidental non-probabilistic method for the selection of the mothers and a prospective, nonexperimental design, of cross section and descriptive type to study the level of knowledge and correlational type to study the relation between this variable and the above mentioned factors were used; it was developed and applied to each mother a questionnaire made up of questions on her personal, educational and socioeconomic data and of 5 questions by each studied behavior; on the basis of a scale from 0 to 1, a score of 0,6 was considered as an acceptable level of knowledge; for the inferential analysis, it was used the Pearson correlation, Chisquare test, and ANOVA complemented with the SNK test. It was found that the average knowledge score was 0,75 for the studied behaviors and that 88,57% of the mothers had an acceptable level of knowledge of the same ones; also, that it does not exist a significant relation between the level of knowledge of the studied behaviors and the age, residence place, occupation, civil state, parity (personal factors), information source (educational factor) and socioeconomic category (factor) of the mothers, but between the first variable and the educational level (educational factor) of such mothers.