Facilitators and barriers to sunnah eating practices among overweight middle-aged muslim women and the development of sunnah eating practices booklet / Nashrah Adilah Ismail

Overweight has become one of the health problems worldwide. It was reported that the number of people who are overweight keeps on increasing from year to year. Globally in 2016, the World Health Organisation (WHO) reported that approximately 1.9 billion adults were overweight and at least 600 millions of adults were obese. Many studies have been done on healthy eating practices and physical activity for overweight populations. Nevertheless, studies that include faith-based elements to intervene this problem remain scarce, especially regarding the Islamic-based interventions. Studies that include faith- based elements have shown that higher compliance for the faith-based group than the non-faith-based group. To date, no studies published on Sunnah eating practice (SEP) as faith-based elements. Thus, this study is conducted to explore the facilitators and barriers towards SEP among overweight middle-aged Muslim woman. Further, the findings lead to the development of a validated educational booklet on SEP. There were two phases involved in this study. The first phase of the study used the qualitative approach which employs phenomenology design. An in-depth semi-structured interview guide was prepared which focuses on the five main elements of SEP. The interview session was audio-taped, transcribed verbatim and the entire analysis of the data used the thematic analysis. The second phase of the study was the development of validated educational booklet on SEP. A total of 22 subjects participated in the first phase. All of them were Malay (100%) with mean age 52 years old and mean Body Mass Index (BMI) 27.7kg/m2. The facilitating factors were health status, appetite, awareness, food pyramid as guidance, observe Sunnah practices, culture, serving size, environment, denture, accessibility and body posture. Meanwhile, the barriers to Sunnah eating practices were appetite, outside foods, time constraints, culture, preferences, desire, expensive, lazy, responsibilities and self-control. The second phase of the study was the development of validated educational booklet on SEP. The developed booklet was validated by 22 judges and 20 adults. The instrument used for the judges was the judgement-based instrument. The validated educational booklet showed that 19 judges had a proportion of relevance (S-CVI/AVE) of 1 which means all the seven items were rated relevance.