Health-Promoting Behaviors and Their Association With Certain Demographic Characteristics of Nursing Students of Tehran City in 2013

Background and Objectives: Nursing students provide health services and their behavior may affect the clinical services that they provide to clients. In addition, Health-promoting behaviors among nursing students may affect the quality of patient education. Therefore, the aim of this study was to determine the relationship between health-promoting behaviors and certain demographic characteristics of nursing students in Tehran.

Methods: This cross-sectional study was performed on 404 undergraduate nursing students (107 males and 297 females) of universities of Tehran who were selected through stratified random sampling procedure. The data collection tools were: demographic characteristics questionnaire and health-promoting lifestyle profile 2. This standard instrument has 6 subscales of nutrition, physical activity, spiritual growth, health responsibility, interpersonal relations, and stress management. In order to keep the weight of the expressions of the tool and subscale scores the mean were calculated. For this purpose, each expression was scored on a scale of 1 to 4. Internal consistency (Cronbach’s Alpha) of this tool was a=0.86. Data was analyzed by using statistical tests of Chi Square, Independent T and ANOVA.

Results: According to the results, health-promoting behaviors among the students scored highly. The analysis of subscales of health-promoting lifestyle profile 2 showed that the highest mean belongs to the subscale of spiritual growth and the lowest mean belongs to the subscale of physical activity. The mean of health-promoting behaviors among married students was higher than among single students. Moreover, as students advanced through academic years, health responsibility increased and stress management reduced.

Discussion: Undoubtedly, physical activity and stress management have a significant role in personal health and occupational satisfaction of students, which consequently help them provide better services to clients. Therefore, considering the low scores of students in these sections, nursing education managers, policymakers and planners should pay attention to these problems.