Improving menstrual health knowledge among girls from Iran: the effectiveness of educational health belief model

ABSTRACT

Menstrual health education is one of the important aspects of health education during adolescence in girls. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the Health Belief Model (HBM) on promoting Knowledge of menstrual health in female students of Fasa City, Fars Province, Iran. This quasi-experimental study was done on 200 high school girls (100 experimental and 100 control groups) who were selected using a random sampling method in Fasa City, Fars Province, Iran, in 2019–2020. The educational intervention for the experimental group consisted of 6 training sessions of 50–55 minutes through lectures, Q & A, group discussion, educational posters and pamphlets, videoclips, and PowerPoint. A scale of this study consisted of two parts; demographic information, and HBM constructs were used to determine the behaviors of menstrual health in two (before and 3 months after intervention) times. The mean age of students in the experimental and control groups was 13.40 ± 0.68 and 13.34 ± 0.72 years. The results showed that before the educational intervention, there was no significant difference between the experimental and control groups in terms of knowledge, perceived sensitivity, perceived severity, perceived benefits, perceived barriers, self-efficacy, cues to action and performance; however, three months after the intervention, the experimental group showed a significant increase in each of the mentioned variables except the perceived barriers. Based on the present study, education based on the health belief model structures is effective in improving Knowledge of menstrual health and this model can be used to prevent and reduce the symptoms of premenstrual syndrome.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• female students
• health belief model
• menstrual health

Acknowledgments

This study is approved by the Fasa University of Medical Sciences (code approved: 97076 and ethics code: IR.FUMS.REC.1397.104). Our warm thanks go to the Research and Technology Dept. of Fasa University of Medical Sciences, as well as female students of Fasa City for their participation in the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

Data available upon reasonable request to the corresponding author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Research reported in this article was jointly supported by Fasa university of medical sciences.