Social Competence and Body Weight Among Primary Schools pupils at Assiut City-Egypt

Abstract

Background: Social competence is essential for social, cognitive, and emotional development and for encompasses skills and behaviors of a child that lead to positive social outcomes. Although overweight or underweight may lead to lower social competence, it is also possible that low social competence increases the chances of becoming overweight or underweight.The current study aimed to examine the relationship between pupils’ body mass index and social competence in primary schools at Assiut City. This study was conducted in 25% of the primary schools (13 schools) at Assiut City.  A descriptive cross-sectional study and multistage, stratifiedsampling were used. In the first stage, schools were selected randomly from a sampling frame that included all Assiut City governmental primary schools ordered according to the region, seven schools were chosen from the west region and six schools from the east region of the city.  Also,one class from each of the 5^th and 6^th grades in the selected schools was randomly chosen.The total sample of this study was 1119 pupils. Two tools were used:The first toolincludes socioeconomic data, measuring weight and height for calculating body mass index.  The second tool includesthe social competence questioners. The mean results show that 31.4% of the studied pupils had overweightand 41.6% of them had low social competence. Also, there is a significant difference between body mass index and total mean score of social competence with P=0.018. Also, shows significantdifference between socio economiccharacteristics and social competence at age, academic years, mother and father education and father occupation. The present study concluded thatlow social competence in elementary schools is associated with increased risk of overweight or underweight and shows a strong positive correlation between social competence and body mass index. The study recommendedthat providing social training skills programs for pupils to increase social competenceand an educational program for public to improve social competence among underweight, normal weight, overweight and obese pupils.