Social Support-Seeking Behaviours in an Online Support Group for Dental Anxiety: A Content Analysis.

First aid is an essential component of public emergency response and can reduce preventable harm before professional medical care becomes available (). Many high-income countries place a strong emphasis on public first-aid training and have incorporated it into national education systems. For example, approximately 80% of the population in Germany has received formal first-aid training (), and nationwide surveys in Norway have likewise reported broad first-aid training coverage (). In contrast, the population coverage of emergency first-aid knowledge and skills in China is estimated to be only about 1%, far below that in high-income settings, which may undermine the effectiveness of prehospital emergency care (). The Healthy China Action (2019–2030) explicitly set a target of increasing the proportion of individuals holding first-aid training certificates to at least 3% by 2030 (). University students represent an important population for first-aid education because they are often exposed to campus, community, and public-space emergencies, and may become immediate bystanders in time-sensitive situations (). However, students’ first aid-related preparedness remains uneven, and knowledge acquisition alone may not be sufficient to ensure willingness or readiness to act in emergencies (). In many institutions, first-aid education remains largely theory-based; although students may acquire some conceptual knowledge, they often receive insufficient hands-on training and may therefore be reluctant to intervene in real-life emergencies (). In addition, first-aid education varies across regions and student backgrounds. Students from rural areas or ethnic minority groups may have fewer opportunities to receive first-aid training and consequently tend to report lower levels of first-aid knowledge and skills (, ). Guizhou Province is home to a large ethnic minority population, and many ethnic minority freshmen enrolled in local universities come from underdeveloped rural or mountainous areas where access to systematic first-aid training before university entry may be limited (). The knowledge–attitude–practice (KAP) framework has been widely used in health-related behavior research (); however, it should not be interpreted as a simple linear process in which knowledge directly leads to behavioral change. In first-aid contexts, individuals’ willingness to provide assistance and actual helping behavior are influenced by multiple psychological and contextual factors, including self-efficacy, perceived behavioral control, subjective norms, emotional responses, fear of causing harm, and environmental constraints, which are consistent with the Theory of Planned Behavior, Social Cognitive Theory, and self-efficacy theory. Despite its widespread application, traditional variable-centered analyses based on the KAP framework typically focus on average associations and may overlook substantial heterogeneity within populations. Latent profile analysis (LPA), a person-centered approach, enables the identification of unobserved subgroups by classifying individuals according to similar response patterns across multiple observed indicators, thereby providing a more nuanced understanding of behavioral heterogeneity (). Against this background, the present study applied a KAP-based questionnaire to assess first aid-related knowledge, attitudes, and self-reported practices among ethnic minority freshmen at a medical university in Guizhou, China, and subsequently used LPA to explore whether distinct latent subgroups existed with different KAP patterns, such as relatively favorable versus less favorable profiles. This approach aimed to better capture within-group heterogeneity and provide evidence for more targeted and tailored first-aid education strategies in university settings.