Knowledge, attitude, and practice of prophetic food consumption among students of Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin, Terengganu

The present work aimed to investigate the levels of knowledge, attitude, and practice of prophetic food consumption among UniSZA students. The present work was conducted from September 2017 until April 2018 at the UniSZA Gong Badak Campus, Terengganu. In this cross-sectional study, a total of 217 students were recruited by convenience purposive sampling method. A questionnaire was based on the prophetic food consumption details, consisting of four sections, namely; demographic data, knowledge, attitude, and practice of the consumption. Reliability test found that the validity and internal consistency of the questionnaire to be acceptable with a Cronbach Alpha value of 0.752. Data were analysed using Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet 2013 and SPSS version 21.0. The results showed that most of the respondents had good knowledge of prophetic food consumption (45.6%). More than half had a good level of attitude (66.4%), and only a minority of them (38.2%) had a poor practice of prophetic food consumption. Based on Independent t-test and One-Way ANOVA statistical test, there was a significant difference in the mean attitude scores between male and female students, mean attitude and practice scores between the three age groups, mean knowledge scores between the three fields of study groups, and mean knowledge, attitude, and practice scores between the four religions. A positive correlation was observed for the three domains, namely between knowledge and attitude (r = 0.71), knowledge and practice (ρ = 0.37), and attitude and practice (ρ = 0.43), based on Spearman or Pearson correlation test. In conclusion, the importance of prophetic food must be highlighted and shared among multi-religious university students for them to be more familiar with the relevant health and sustainability issues. The students may employ effective attitude and behaviour towards the practical implementation of prophetic food if they are provided with more integrated knowledge in the learning environment of the university.