Patterns of Self-medication Practices by Caregivers to Under-five Children in South-Western Nigeria
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Self-medication has generated a serious public health concern with its accompanied unhealthy practices. In Nigeria, the prevalence of self-medication is on the increase. Globally, the use of medicines for children is of serious concern as children are considered to be vulnerable group. Despite the full range of self-medication practices, not much is known about its extension to the most vulnerable of under-five children in Nigeria. This paper examined the patterns of self-medication practices among the caregivers to under-five children in south-western Nigeria. Two local government areas from Lagos and Osun states were selected for the study based on their cosmopolitanism and non-cosmopolitanism nature. Eighty-six caregivers to under-five children within the communities participated in the discussions. Purposive snowballing technique was used to select the participants in the study area with the aid of people of influence in the community for the FGDs. Twelve FGDs were conducted and stratified into younger caregivers and older caregivers. Data were collected with the aid of FGD guide for the caregivers of U-5 children and with the assistance of audio-tape recorder to obtain relevant information from those involved in the practice of self-medicating to their U-5 children. Data were analyzed based on thematic analysis. This was developed by the use of codes based on the identified variables from the fieldwork. Data were transcribed verbatim and classified into different themes. Analysis was done with the aid of Nvivo 11.0, a software designed for the analysis of qualitative data. The pattern of self-medication identified from this study included various combinations of herbal medicine, western medicine and faith-based medicaments. Also, the social factors associated with these patterns included, age of the caregivers, level of education, religion and relationship of the caregivers to their under-five children.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".