GENDER AND AGE BASED DIFFERENCES IN SUBJECTIVE OWN-BODY ASSESSMENT AT ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

Health literacy is an influenceable determinant of health and should be included in all forms of education. The need to improve health literacy arises from all four priority areas of the Health 2020 program and is a global trend. Health literacy supports the assumption of personal responsibility of individuals for their own health, observance of prevention guidelines, and caring for their own health. Each person creates a specific image of oneself, this image and attitude to oneself are called self-conception. Self-conception also includes the attitude to one’s own body. Monitoring the attitudes to oneself increases the knowledge about the target group that we want to educate in the area of caring for one’s own health. The main objective of the research study was to identify the attitudes to one’s own body in elementary and secondary school students in the Olomouc Region. A questionnaire was used to identify subjective assessment of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with one’s own body. The survey included a total of 1,205 respondents. The number of valid answers to question 1 was 1,176 (97.6%), of which 587 were girls and 510 were boys. The number of valid answers to question 2 was 1,161 (96.3 %), of which 577 were girls and 605 were boys. The age of the respondents was 7 to 25 years (SD 2.49). The study focused on gender-based differences and the relationship between age and the attitude to one’s own body. The data were analyzed by the Statistica 10.0 program. The results of the research suggest that most of the girls do not like their body (74%); but despite this fact, a total of 82.5% of girls indicated that they would not like to change anything about their body. In the group of boys, the dissatisfaction is even higher (86.4%), a total of 53.9% of boys would not like to change their body. A correlation analysis in girls revealed a correlation between age and the attitude to one’s own body and a desire to change one’s own body. In boys no correlation between age and the attitude to one’s own body or a desire to change one’s own body was identified.