Drowning remains a preventable cause of adolescent death, and Malaysian water-safety research has not established how safety knowledge is translated into conduct around water. This study tested whether sensation seeking mediates the association between water safety knowledge and high-risk swimming behaviour, and whether swimming self-efficacy conditions that association, among Malaysian secondary school students. A cross-sectional survey of 684 students from 36 government secondary schools across four states measured all four constructs by self-report. A path-analysis structural equation model estimated direct, indirect and interaction effects, controlling for age, sex, grade level and recent swimming frequency, with 5,000 school-cluster bootstrap resamples. Water safety knowledge was negatively associated with sensation seeking and with high-risk swimming behaviour, while sensation seeking was positively associated with high-risk swimming behaviour. The interaction between knowledge and self-efficacy was not significant. The interaction between sensation seeking and self-efficacy was negative, and the conditional indirect association weakened from ?0.068 at low self-efficacy to ?0.038 at high self-efficacy, with an index of moderated mediation of 0.00197. Safety knowledge relates to behaviour both directly and indirectly, and the indirect route varies with how capable students believe themselves to be in water.
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