A Study on the knowledge, attitudes and practices (KAP) towards cremation as an environmental management measure
- Author
- Chinyama, Lyndsey T.
- Title
- A Study on the knowledge, attitudes and practices (KAP) towards cremation as an environmental management measure
- Abstract
-
Traditional burial using graves exerts pressure on the land resource as it takes up land that could be used for other competing uses. With population growth and the requisite expansion in agricultural land to provide food, it is necessary to release land that could be used for burial and allot it to agricultural and other land uses. This, coupled with the fact that burial ground is running out (Masona and Gwisai, 2023) calls for alternative methods of corpse disposal that do not compete for land with agriculture such as cremation. However before cremation can be recommended as a practice, it is important to determine the responses of communities towards cremation so as to find out their knowledge, attitudes and practices. Depending on the findings, campaigns can be formulated that target the right group according to the distribution of KAP across socio-demographic attributes. The study employed a cross sectional survey design. A total of one hundred and two questionnaires were administered among residents in the Aerodrome suburb of Bindura. The questionnaire consisted of four sections namely, demographic characteristics, knowledge, attitude, and practices (KAP) section. Data were analysed using SPSS to generate frequencies for each KAP question. From the frequencies in percentage, a preferred KAP answer was assigned a score of 1 and a non-preferred answer was assigned 0 to come up with an overall score for each of Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices. Multinomial logistic regression was used to relate KAP to socio-demographic variables. A total of 102 respondents participated in the study with 51% being male, while 49% were female. 59% of the participants were accounted for by the 18-25 age group. The participant’s knowledge score was moderately high at 0.7 or 70%. The attitude score was quite negative at 41%. The practices score was very poor at 0%. The study concludes that knowledge on cremation was relatively fair, attitudes negative and practices almost non-existent. This means the study concludes that in the study area, cremation is not to be adopted as an alternative body disposal method. The study also concludes that the determinants of knowledge and attitudes are age, education and sex. The study recommends awareness campaigns about the fact that burial grounds are running out and encourage people to adopt cremation as an alternative body disposal method. The awareness campaigns should alert people of the dangers of traditional body disposal by burial on water pollution through preserving chemicals. Furthermore it is recommended that the awareness campaigns should be designed to target those of age groups above 18-25, females and those that have not attained tertiary education. This may entail using information media that are more common to ordinary people as opposed to those accessible to educated people.
- Date
- May 2025
- Publisher
- BUSE
- Keywords
- Cremation
- Corpse disposal
- Burial
- Supervisor
- Mr T. Nyamugure
- Item sets
- Department of Environmental Science
- Media
-
Chinyama - SHEM.pdf