Association Between Poor Sitting Posture and Neck Pain Among College Students

Abstract

Neck pain is one of the most common causes of musculoskeletal disabilities worldwide, and college students are at a high risk due to sitting for long periods of time while also displaying poor posture. All studies in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, India, China, Ethiopia and Hong Kong have found an association between poor posture and neck pain among college students. Still, no study has been conducted in Dehradun or among the students who attend Uttaranchal University to date. This study tested whether there was a relationship between poor posture and neck pain among college students. We used structured self-report surveys to gather data from 304 college students; these surveys asked about their self-reported slouch posture when seated and how much they felt their pain increased when they were seated. We also used two Likert-scale questions: the first asked them to rate the degree of stiffness after they finished sitting down, and the second asked how much they believed neck pain was caused by poor posture. We used descriptive statistics, Spearman rank-order correlations, Chi-Square Tests of association with Cramer's V. Self-reported slouched posture was positively correlated with both pain measures (Spearman's ρ = .302 and .465, both p < .001), which provided the primary evidence for this relationship; a smaller, secondary association was also found between posture type and pain-attribution beliefs (Cramer’s V = .134, a small effect by conventional benchmarks). Kruskal-Wallis H and Mann-Whitney U tests showed us that those postural attitudes did not differ significantly across any demographic or behavioural subgroup we tested, including sex, sitting hours, screen time, etc. This supports our findings that there is a broadly uniform pattern amongst all of the student samples. This confirmed the alternate hypothesis, which confirms that there is a positive relationship between poor posture and neck pain among college students. This makes it clear that institution-wide ergonomic educational programs and postural correction programs will need to be developed and implemented as a prevention program for college students.