Abstract
The awareness survey in both the information and communication media environment and the information behavior of about 700 students at 4 primary and secondary schools in Chiang Mai province, Thailand was conducted on March 2017 as the preliminary study for developing the media education tool for rabies prevention in Asian countries. Rabies is a fatal disease and presents especially in poor and vulnerable locations in the Asia and Africa. Globally, children between the ages of under 15 are frequent victims for rabies. This survey was conducted in such environment. The education on dog behavior and bite prevention for children is the essential factor to prevent from rabies infection. In order to develop this education tool, it was necessary to investigate students' media environment and information behavior before hand. In this survey, the effective responses were aged 6 to 19. The popular media devices were smart phone (57.4%), TV (32.4%), and PC (8.3%) in order. The mode of daily media usage was from 1 hour to 3 hours (62.7%). The result of Chi-Square test showed students living in rural area tend to use mass media, on the other hand, students in urban area tend to use Internet media: Males tend to prefer collective communication, on the other hand, females tend to prefer personal communication. In conclusion, it can be said that Internet media is very popular in all over the age of students surveyed regardless of school region, age, gender, and mother tongue, and it should be used as the educational media tool for rabies prevention.
