Healthy lifestyles and academic performance in university students

Abstract

This study aimed to identify the relationship between healthy lifestyles and academic performance in a sample of 157 university students from the Faculty of Early Education at the Enrique Guzmán y Valle National University of Education, Peru. It was carried out by means of a cross-sectional descriptive correlation design. The data were collected through the Lifestyle Beliefs and Practices Questionnaire, taken from Arrivillaga, Salazar and Gómez (2002) and the academic performance was obtained from the Weighted Average Records of Academic Performance issued by the UNE’s Office of Registration and Academic Services. The following results and conclusions were reached: 85.99% of students obtained a medium-healthy lifestyle and 67.50% obtained a medium-healthy academic performance or regularly achieved learning, which indicates that the presence of medium-healthy lifestyles in students regularly favours their academic performance. A mean positive Spearman’s Rho correlation coefficient (r=0.6529) was also observed between healthy lifestyles and academic performance, indicating that higher levels of healthy lifestyles lead to higher levels of academic performance or learning achieved by university students.

Keywords: healthy lifestyles; lifestyles; health; quality of life, academic performance.