Health and environmental practices levels among female students of scientific and humanities academic majors

BACKGROUND: Courses’ resources is an important ingredient for building awareness, despite the availability of health and environmental knowledge in some subjects, students’ practices still need more improvement. The study aims to investigate the level of health and environmental practices among university female students of both scientific and humanities subject majors, and its relationship to the academic major. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A descriptive research design is applied to a sample of 410 female students enrolled in scientific and humanities majors during 2017/2018 academic year. A “Health and Environmental Practices Scale” is prepared for data collection. It includes 58 items with Cronbach's alpha = 0.71 and 0.69 for the two domains. The means percentage and independent t-test for the two majors applied, as P ≤ 0.05 was statistically significant. RESULTS: Results showed that (i) the level of health and environmental practices is “moderate” with a mean of 2.89, 3.17 for both domains, respectively; (ii) there is no statistically significant difference between health practices level and environmental practices level; (iii) there is no statistically significant difference between humanities and scientific majors and health and environmental practices level among students of humanities and scientific majors, which means that the impact of the interdisciplinary courses on the level of health and environmental practices is not clear. CONCLUSIONS: Health and environmental awareness among students are found to be moderate. However, actual health and environmental practices are still a huge challenge because of the gap between theory and practice.