Sir,I read an article titled “knowledge, attitude and practices of women toward breast cancer in Benin City, Nigeria” published in your journal (2013;3:155-60).[1] As the titled suggests, the study was aimed at assessment of three components of a knowledge attitude and practice study (KAP); knowledge component, attitude component and practice component. The ease, with which these studies are carried out, makes these studies a useful survey methodology. Most of the knowledge attitude and practice studies lack in measuring attitude properly (the second part of a standard KAP survey questionnaire).[2] It is here that this study suffers too. The study also suffers on its inability to record the practice component of a KAP. Further the practice component has been surrogated with non-practice, which is not an ideal way to explore this component. In this regard help can be taken from articles previously published, highlighting the methodology to explore the components of KAP studies.[23]The attitude part could have been constructed as follows:A health-care provider invites patient seeks consultation for breast examination during a screening program. The target attitude for in this situation should be receiving a screen: The scale should read as:Question: Getting screened by a health-care provider is?
Scoring
Recode the items that have negatively worded endpoints on the right, so that higher numbers then always reflect a positive attitude to the target behavior (e.g., for “pleasant-unpleasant,” an answer of 6 becomes score of 2; a score of 4 remains a 4.