Body awareness on postural sitting habits among college students in online classes

The risk of students being more exposed to poor posture and discomfort during school hours has become a problem when the threat of COVID-19 started. As the pandemic has made the government implement an online learning set-up as a new mode of learning, requiring the students to sit for a long period of time while the increasing rate of time consumed in technology usage, adds up to postural problems during online classes (Jolly, 2020). This was observed in a 2020 survey conducted by the American Chiropractic Association, with 92% of their patients were reported to experiencing muscle pain (such as back and neck pain) and as well as other musculoskeletal issues ever since the pandemic began, not exempting the children in these issues With this, with the targeted United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals: good health and well-being and Ambisyon Natin 2040: Maginhawa, the research study discusses the difference in the college students’ level of body awareness on postural sitting habits. The 5-point frequency Likert scale survey used in the study are adapted from the article entitled Back Health and Posture by Cleveland Clinic (2019) and other studies conducted by Daneshmandi et al. (2017), Schwertner et al. (2018), and Holland (2020). The survey questionnaires were divided into three sections: questionnaires about demographic profile, postural habits and sitting habits. The research findings say that the postural habits have high level of awareness with the frequency rate of 31.2% (125 respondents), on the other hand, medium level of awareness (59.9%) was shown to have highest frequency rate as seen in the data results of sitting habits. Therefore, after using Kruskal Wallis and Shapiro Wilk to know the significant difference between the respondents’ demographic profile and their level of postural sitting habits, the results showed that there is a significant difference between postural habits and sex (p-value = 0.043) and as well as the level of eye gaze (p-value = 0.006) of college students. Thus, these results proves that the sex and level of eye gaze influence the level of awareness on postural habits of participants. With this, the researchers encourage the beneficiaries of the study to use the study’s findings in analyzing the current situation faced by online students due to poor posture and sedentary lifestyle, and to recommend the future researchers to conduct further studies to explore the other contributing factors that could give the online learners and as well as the community, a view of self-awareness on their postural sitting habits while witnessing a comprehensive postural awareness widespread to lessen the prevalence of these in the society.