During the last few decades, several studies have analyzed and described knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP) of populations regarding dengue. However, few studies have applied geometric data analytic techniques to generate indices from KAP domains. Results of such analyses have not been used to determine the potential effects of sociodemographic variables on the levels of KAP. The objective was to determine the sociodemographic factors related to different levels of KAP regarding dengue in two hyper-endemic cities of Colombia, using a multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) technique. In the context of a cluster randomized trial, 3,998 households were surveyed in Arauca and Armenia between 2012 and 2013. To generate KAP indexes, we performed a MCA followed by a hierarchical cluster analysis to classify each score in different groups. A quantile regression for each of the score groups was conducted. KAP indexes explained 56.1%, 79.7%, and 83.2% of the variance, with means of 4.2, 1.4, and 3.2 and values that ranged from 1 to 7, 7 and 11, respectively. The highest values of the index denoted higher levels of knowledge and practices. The attitudes index did not show the same relationship and was excluded from the analysis. In the quantile regression, age (0.06; IC: 0.03, 0.09), years of education (0.14; IC: 0.06, 0.22), and history of dengue in the family (0.21; IC: 0.12, 0.31) were positively related to lower levels of knowledge regarding dengue. The effect of such factors gradually decreased or disappeared when knowledge was higher. The practices indexes did not evidence a correlation with sociodemographic variables. These results suggest that the transformation of categorical variables into a single index by the use of MCA is possible when analyzing knowledge and practices regarding dengue from KAP questionnaires. Additionally, the magnitude of the effect of socioeconomic variables on the knowledge scores varies according to the levels of knowledge, suggesting that other factors might be influencing higher levels of knowledge.
Funding
This study was financed with resources from Departamento Administrativo de Ciencia Tecnología e Innovación—Colciencias assigned to the project "Ecosystems research for the design and implementation of sustainable strategies for dengue in the regions of Arauca and Quindio" in the year 2011 to the Centro de Estudios e Investigación en Salud CEIS of Fundación Santa Fe de Bogotá, Colombia. http://www.colciencias.gov.co/sites/default/files/upload/documents/resolucion_01197a.pdf. Departamento Administrativo de Ciencia Tecnología e Innovación—Colciencias had no role in study design, data collection and anlysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Data are available from the Data Repository of the Eje de Salud Publica of Fundación Santa Fe de Bogotá Institutional Data Access. Please contact: ceis@fsfb.org.co or call at (57)1-6030303 ext 5705. The Institutional Ethics Committee of the Fundación Santa Fe de Bogota qualifies this data as "confidential" and requires notification of its use without personal identifiers for any person interested in it.