Abstract:
Background: Engagement of school students in malaria prevention and control is an essential strategy. Pieces of evidences indicated students were potent messengers and change agents for public health challenges. Nonetheless, little is known about the involvement of students in message development and dissemination.
Objective: This study was aimed to explore malaria message contents of poems generated by primary school students.
Methods: A qualitative content analysis approach was conducted on malaria poems generated by primary school students. Twenty poems were purposively selected from twenty schools across rural villages in five districts of Jimma Zone. Conventional and summative approaches were used to analyze the poems using Atlas.ti version 7.1.4 software. Message contents with metaphors were presented using central themes, categories, and specifications with supportive quotations. Finally, message contents were quantified based on the frequency of occurrence.
Results: A total of 602 specific malaria contents were generated across twenty poems. The contents were put into twenty one categories that were lined-up along five central themes. Knowledge about malaria and its prevention methods, threat perception from malaria and risk condition, misconceptions and malpractices, effectiveness of preventive methods, and calls to adaptations of practices were the five central themes. Metaphors, simile, and personifications were the commonest ones used by students for composing their poem. Message about severity of malaria (101=16.8%), distinguishable signs and symptoms (66=11%), manifest calls to practice of malaria prevention and elimination (63=10.5%), and effectiveness of ITN use (49=8.1%) were the commonest conveyed contents.
Conclusion: Messages about severity of malaria, signs and symptoms, calls to practice of malaria elimination, and effectiveness of ITN use were the commonest conveyed contents. Nonetheless, messages about vulnerability and seeking of treatment for fever were low. So, it is important to encourage the students to design messages that increases perception of community members remains susceptible to malaria and to seek treatment for fever. Metaphoric expressions; war and death; and personification of mosquitoes as men doing evil in wiles were used to convey message about severity and ITN usage metaphorically represented as a trap to mosquitoes
