Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices Survey

The KAP gap is the discrepancy between the layers of knowledge, attitude, and practice — most commonly the gap between high knowledge and low practice. It diagnoses why a desired behaviour is not adopted: if people know what to do and believe it matters but still do not do it, the barrier is not information but access, cost, social norms, or motivation. Identifying which gap dominates tells programme designers what type of intervention (information, persuasion, or enabling environment) is required.

The chief weaknesses are reliance on self-report, which invites social-desirability and recall bias and tends to overstate approved knowledge and practices; the weak and context-dependent link between measured attitudes and actual behaviour; and the cross-sectional design, which shows association but not causation. Good practice mitigates these by triangulating with direct observation, biomarkers, or qualitative methods and by careful, non-leading questionnaire design.

A KAP survey measures all three of knowledge, attitudes, and practices around a topic, usually as a one-off baseline or endline for a specific programme. A behavioural surveillance survey focuses on repeated measurement of risk behaviours (and sometimes biomarkers) in defined populations over time to track trends, particularly for HIV. KAP surveys are broader and more diagnostic; surveillance surveys are narrower and designed for longitudinal trend monitoring.