On Reliability in Evaluating the Awareness of Health Hazard of Tobacco Smoking of a Group Bangladeshi Students

The present analysis was based on data related to knowledge about health hazard of tobacco smoking of a group of students. The data were collected from 798 students of American International University-Bangladesh during the academic session 2012-2013. Around 87% of the investigated students were high in awareness of health hazard of tobacco smoking but still 32.3% students were smokers. There was none who was low in awareness. The awareness had been measured by 20 items. Though most of the students were highly aware of the problem still a good number of them were smokers. Thus, a question, naturally, arose whether measure of awareness was reliable. In this paper, reliability measure had been done by Cronbach’s alpha [1]. The value of α is 0.94 indicating that the evaluation of knowledge of health hazard of tobacco smoking was excellent. Reliability had also been measured by Spearman-Brown formula and the value of the coefficient was 0.92.

Keywords: Awareness of health hazard of tobacco smoking; Smokers; Reliability of measure of awareness; Spearman-brown formula for reliability; Cronbach’s alpha