Question

Background: Self-medication is the use of drugs to treat self-diagnosed disorders or symptoms or the intermittent or continued use of prescribed drug for chronic or recurrent disease or symptoms, and it is mostly common in developing countries. This study therefore assessed the practice of self-medication among undergraduate students of a private university in Nigeria.
Methods: The study employed a descriptive cross-sectional design. A pretested questionnaire was self-administered to 384 undergraduate students of the university. Data were analysed and summarised using descriptive and inferential statistics such as chi-squared and Fisher's exact tests.
Results: Overall, 297 (81.8%) undergraduate students practiced self-medication. About 71% of the students had used analgesic, antibiotics (10.5%), and antimalarial drugs (33%) without prescription within one month prior to the survey. The most commonly used drug for self-medication was paracetamol (75.1%). Furthermore, self-medication was found to be significantly associated with age (p=0.021), gender (p < 0.001), college (p=0.025), and year of study (p=0.004). Some of the reasons why undergraduate students practiced self-medication were because of the unfriendly attitude of healthcare workers (27.7%), lack of time to go to school clinic (26.7%), school clinic is too far from hostel (15.3%), and drugs prescribed in the school clinic do not improve health condition (15.3%).
Conclusion: Majority of the students attributed the practice of self-medication to unfriendly attitude of health care workers in the university clinic.

According to the article above , answer the following questions:

What is the intended purpose of the study?

How does the research questions/hypotheses address the problem as detailed by the researcher?

How does the content in the purpose statement and research questions define the methodology used in the study?

How was the data collected and analyzed? What was the benefit of using the selected statistical test?

What was the outcome of the study?

Answer 1

What is the intended purpose of the study?

The purpose of the study is to understand the self-medication practices in the 3^rd world countries.

How does the research questions/hypotheses address the problem as detailed by the researcher?

A pretested questionnaire was sent to sample population of about 384 undergraduate students of the university

How does the content in the purpose statement and research questions define the methodology used in the study?

The method employed to understand the problem is found to be explorative and for that inferential statistics were used, for the detailed description of the data chi-squared test and Fisher's exact test were used.

How was the data collected and analysed? What was the benefit of using the selected statistical test?

Inferential statistics and chi square and fisher’s exact tests were used. It will give the detail description of the data in to different clusters and its relationship with socio-demographic variables.

What was the outcome of the study?

Most of the students were using self-medication and the most used form of self-medication is paracetamol. The reason they explained for the self-medication are he unfriendly attitude of healthcare workers (27.7%), lack of time to go to school clinic (26.7%), school clinic is too far from hostel (15.3%), and drugs prescribed in the school clinic do not improve health condition (15.3%).