BMC Public Health 2007, 7:354 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/7/354 cent's general health behaviors, knowledge, and attitudes, socio-economic status with respect to whether the house- hold had items such as a telephone etc, media ownership, use, and knowledge, including accessing online health information, and their perceptions of the Internet, were then collected. In general, multiple-choice questions were used, for which participants could easily indicate their responses. For example, a list of 20 topics was provided from which participants could check off those topics they had tried to get information on from the Internet. On a few occasions, an oral interview was used to clarify issues that were not clearly gauged from the questionnaire, an undertaking that has been fully described in Nwagwu [24]. The data was analysed descriptively first, and then Chi square was used for comparisons, placing our signifi- cance level at p < 0.05. Student's t test was used to com- pare the perception of the in-school and out-of-school girls regarding the quality of information resources they found on the Internet. Regression analysis was further used to gauge how some reproductive health issues for which the adolescents used Internet could be predicted by their demographic characteristics. Table 1: Some characteristic of the respondents Result Out of the 1200 copies of questionnaire distributed to the in-school adolescents, 1129 were returned, with 1011 being usable. This high return rate, which represents 94% and 84% respectively, was achieved mainly because the school authorities were involved in mobilizing the partic- ipation of the students. When the number of out-of- school students was added, there was a total of 1145 respondents. The personal characteristics of the respond- ents are shown in Table 1. The Chi square values, which are significant for all the characteristics in the two groups, underpin some differences between the in-school and the out-of-school girls. Table 2 presents information concerning working radios, hours spent a week listening to radio, working televisions in the household and hours spent a week watching televi- sion as well as Internet use, Internet access at home and email accounts ownership for all the categories of respondents. A Chi Square analysis shows that at 5% level of significance, the two groups are also different in these use aspects of the selected media. These differences would Total N = 1145 In-school n = 1011 Out-of-school n = 134 Chi Square statistic Characteristics Age (%) 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 Living with (%) Parents School Boarding house Other Hostel Others Education status of parents (%) None Primary Secondary College of education/Polytechnic University Occupation of parents (%) Self employed Private sector Public sector Household appliances (%Yes) Radio Television Telephone Car Computer Refrigerator ** = significant at 0.05 14.12 17.23 16.23 13.08 12.19 16.18 12.17 37.39 12.17 22.78 27.66 12.13 14.33 30.12 15.43 34.09 23.17 34.15 42.68 79.11 78.21 22.18 43.67 19.90 45.09 14.44 17.33 16.11 15.18 14.45 12.26 11.23 32.01 15.48 12.5 40.01 4.16 15.14 21.18 12.33 47.19 19.19 45.13 35.68 81.22 79.11 23.48 45.27 23.41 47.01 12.12 13.08 17.94 12.01 13.13 16.43 15.33 47.15 5.95 28.02 28.88 15.21 17.32 35.12 19.00 13.35 24.13 25.26 50.61 76.71 76.81 21.10 32.12 18.11 46.01 67.12** 121.12** 109.09** 12.09** 68.68** 78.42** 89.16** 33.58** 55.22** 21.43** Page 4 of 13 (page number not for citation purposes)