Abstract:
The research purposes were to study breastfeeding promotion behavior of staff nurses and to investigate the relationships between predisposing, enabling, and reinforcing factors and breastfeeding promotion behavior of staff nurses. The study sample consisted of 220 staff nurses who had working experience of or more than 1 year. They were selected by using multistage random sampling from the maternity ward and newborn ward of five tertiary level hospitals in Bangkok Metropolitan. Research instruments were the questionnaires of attitudes toward breastfeeding promotion, working experiences, perceived availability, training , physical environment, informational support , policy support , head nurses support and breastfeeding promotion behavior of staff nurses. All of the questionnaires had content validities and reliabilities of 0.822, 0.937, 0.877, 0.941, 0.920, 0.961 and 0.966, respectively. The data were analyzed by using frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation and Pearsons product moment correlation coefficient. The study findings were as follows: 1. Breastfeeding promotion behavior of staff nurses was at a moderate level ([X-bar] = 3.26, SD= 0.58 ) 2. There were positively significant relationships between the predisposing factors which included attitudes toward breastfeeding promotion and perceived availability, the enabling factors which included hospital obtaining training, physical environment that supported breastfeeding and breastfeeding promotion information support and the reinforcing factors which included policy support , head nurses support, and the breastfeeding promotion behavior of staff nurses at the level of .05 (r = .365,.592, .256, .513, .280 , .272 and .518 respectively). However, the enabling factor that was working experience did not significantly correlate with breastfeeding promotion behavior of staff nurses at the level of .05 (r = .063)