Resumen

VINAGRE, Maria Da Graça  y  LIMA, Maria Luísa. Os acidentes infantis: Factores socio-cognitivos do comportamento de prevenção dos pais face ao risco de intoxicação da criança no espaço doméstico . Aná. Psicológica [online]. 1998, vol.16, n.1, pp.41-48. ISSN 0870-8231.

Accidents are still an important cause of death among children and adolescents. While traffic accidents are more frequent for this late group, home injuries are still the more usual type life threat for children between 1 and 4 years old. The prevention of home injury has been approached through educational strategies, but they do not seem efficient to lower the incidency rate of some types of home accidents, such as non intentional poisoning. As the accidents occur mainly at home, the modification of hazardous household practices (specifically unproper storage of poisonous substances) may be seen as an important goal. In this study, preventive behaviour of caregivers was approached from a cognitive perspective (e.g. Petersen et al., 1990), to understand the factors underlying the intention of safe storing of poisonous substances. The Health Belief Model (Becker & Maiman, 1975) and the Theory of Planned Behaviour (Ajzen & Madden, 1986) were used to define the predictive variables used in this study. 186 mothers of children between 9 and 15 months were subjects in this study. Results show that the Theory of Planned Behaviour can account for a greater variance of the results than the Health Belief Model, but an integration of the two models significantly higher the levels of explained variance. Our results have also some practical consequences to the content and design of future intervention programmes to prevent unintentional poisoning at home.

Palabras clave : Home injuries; children; preventive behaviours; parents.

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