Gender And Attitude In Indonesia

The Indonesia Statistical Bureau stated that young women and men are a growing proportion of the population; one in five Indonesians belongs to the 15-24 age groups. The young population increased from 35 million in 1980 to more than 42.4 million in 2007 (BPS, 1992). Therefore, the population of Indonesia can be classified as “young”, with a large proportion being in the younger age groups. In 2007, 21.4 million people were in ages 15-19, and 21.0 million were in ages 20-24. Adolescence has been defined in various ways. Basically, it marks the transition from childhood to adulthood. The World Health Organization (1975) defined adolescence to include physical, mental, and socioeconomic progression. Physically, secondary sex characteristics change to sexual and reproductive maturity. Adult mental processes and adult identity are developed during adolescent years. Economically, this is the time when a transition from total socioeconomic dependence to relative independence takes place. This is also a critical stage in life when major decisions regarding career and roles in life are being made and preparatory activities are undertaken (Raymundo et al, 1999). Age has been used to distinguish adolescents according to their physical development, such as early adolescence (age 10-14), middle adolescence (age 15-19), and young adulthood (age 20-24) (James-Traore, 2001). The Centers for Disease Control or CDC analyzed data from the 2001-2010 National Health Interview Surveys (NHIS). This report summarized the results in 2010: 68.8% of adult smokers wanted to stop smoking; 52.4% had made a quit attempt in the past year; 6.2% had recently quit; 48.3% had been advised by a health professional to quit; and, 31.7% had used counseling when they tried to quit. The prevalence of quit attempts increased during 2001-2010 among smokers aged 25-64 years, but not among other age groups. In terms of intention not to start smoking, Mohammadpoorasl, et.al (2012) revealed from their study that the mean age of students (samples) was 15.7 ± 0.73 years, and that 42.9% of were male. The results showed that 95% of the students were those who had never smoked and were sure never to start smoking. The majority of these non smokers made a firm decision to not start smoking in the future. With regard to intention to smoke among adolescents, these were the associated factors: the person possessed a risk taking behavior; he/she had a negative experience like the presence of a smoker in the family; and, the person had positive attitude towards smoking. A. Internal Factors: Knowledge, Attitude, and Self-efficacy There is no single grand theory of behavior-related factors which influence adolescent smokers in school. Some smoking behavior can be caused by negative or positive perception. For instance, Estiananda (2008) explained that Javanese ethnic boys aged 13-17 years could repeat the health warnings on cigarette packs, but also claimed that smoking one to two packs per day was not harmful to health. Furthermore, children are socialized early on to consider smoking as normal and socially acceptable. Bricker, et.al (2010) emphasized there was a 22–27% probability contributed by psychological risk factors for trying out smoking. These psychological factors were greater than the probability contributed by each parent’s/close friend’s smoking. a. Knowledge A recent study showed there were significant differences between those who have access to information about the health consequences of active smoking and those who did not. A study by Dao (2013) regarding knowledge of harmful health effects of active and passive smoking gave the following results: adults living in urban areas were more knowledgeable than those living in rural areas; Kinh ethnic people had greater knowledge than non-Kinhs ethnic; and, current smokers displayed significantly lower knowledge of health risks of active smoking than current non-smokers. This model also indicated that accessing positive information had significant association with knowledge of both active …show more content…
Attitude has three categories are: (1) Cognitive verbal response is expression of beliefs about the attitude’s object, while non-verbal response is perceptual reaction to the attitude’s object; (2) Affection-composed verbal response is expression of feelings toward the attitude’s object, while non-verbal response is the psychological reaction to the attitude’s object; (3) Conation-composed verbal response is expression of behavior intentions, while non-verbal response is overt behaviors with respect to the attitude’s