Health promoting Behaviors Among Adolescents: A Cross-sectional Study

Abstract

Background: Health maintenance and promotion are the fundamental prerequisites to community development. The best time for establishing healthy lifestyle habits is during adolescence. Objectives: Due to importance of health promotion behaviors in adolescents, this study was conducted to investigate healthpromoting behaviors and its associated factors among high school students in Rasht, Iran. Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted on 424 students during the first semester of the year 2012. We employed the multistage sampling design to recruit from private and public high schools in Rasht, Iran. The data collection instrument was a self-report questionnaire consisting of two parts. The first part of instrument was consisted of demographic questionnaire and the second part was adolescent health promotion scale (AHPS) questionnaire. AHPS questionnaire was consisted of six dimensions (nutrition, social support, health responsibility, life appreciation, physical activity, and stress management) to measure health promoting lifestyles. Statistical analysis was performed by SPSS 16 software employing ANOVA (analysis of variance) test, t-test, Mann-Whitney, and the Kruskal-Wallis. Results: The score of total Adolescent Health Promotion Scale were 3.58 ± 0.52 (possible range was 1-5). The highest score was in life appreciation dimension (3.99 ± 0.068) and the lowest score was in health responsibility dimension. Moreover, Significant associations were found between the adolescent health promotion Scale with age (P < 0.001), gender (P < 0.003), school grade (P < 0.011), father's educational level (P < 0.045), mother's educational level (P < 0.021), and mother's occupation (P < 0.008). Conclusions: Female and older students are at higher risk of developing unhealthy lifestyle. Consequently, healthcare providers, health instructors, schoolteachers, and families must pay more attention to these students. Moreover, as most of lifelong healthy and unhealthy lifestyle habits are established during adolescence, developing effective health promotion and disease prevention strategies for adolescents seems crucial.

Determination of healthy lifestyle behaviors of high school students<p>Lise öğrencilerinin sağlıklı yaşam biçimi davranışlarının belirlenmesi

“…Similar results of the studies that have measured healthy life styles behaviors through different scales can be seen in literature (Geçkil and Yıldız, 2006a;Dil, Şentürk and Girgin, 2015;Dağdeviren and Şimşek, 2013;Geçkil and Yıldız, 2006b;Karadamar, Yiğit and Sungur, 2014;Özakgül, Aştı, Ataç and Mercan 2016;Bebiş, Akpunar, Özdemir and Kılıç, 2015;Musavian, Pasha, Rahebi, Roushan and Ghanbari, 2014). This indicates that students did not receive health education at a desired level or they were unable to turn this education into actions.…”

“…Yet, there are contradictory findings in the current study, too. The studies of Bebiş et al (2015) and Musavian et al (2014) explored that 1 st year high school students demonstrated more positive behaviors as compared to other students; which may have resulted from the fact that 2 nd , 3 rd and 4 th year students were in risky adolescence period.…”

The Relationship Between Knowledge About Coronary Heart Diseases Risk Factors and Health-promoting Lifestyle

“…A study reported that age, gender, and occupation influence a health-promoting lifestyle. A health-promoting lifestyle mean score in people with a history of hypertension, cholesterol, heart disease, cigarette smoking, and alcohol consumption was not significantly different from those without these risk factors (Mousavian 2014). Another study indicated a significant relationship between type 2 diabetes mellitus and a health-promoting lifestyle (Angosta & Speck 2014).…”

Relationship Between Adolescents’ Health Promoting Lifestyle Behaviors and Self-Efficacy

“…Moreover, mean scores of male students were found to be higher than those of female students, which complies with the results of studies on GSE that men had higher levels of self-efficacy than women (18,26), which might refer to a correlation with cultural characteristics, child-rearing styles, and education system. McRae et al (24) investigated the gender differences in controlling emotions and maintained that men were much more capable of controlling their negative emotions (27). The scores of HPLP and GSES were compared and consequently a positive significant correlation was reported.…”