effectiveness of the education based on the theory of planned behavior on childbearing intention in single-child women

Introduction: rapid decline of the total fertility rate in iran in recent decades has caused serious demographic challenges to the country. one important reason for this decrease is single-child behavior adopted by iranian families. objective: the present study was conducted to assess the effectiveness of education based on the theory of planned behavior (tpb) on childbearing intention in single-child women. materials and methods: this randomized field trial with the pretest-posttest design was done on 72 single-child women presenting to health centers in mashhad city, iran, in the intervention (37 persons) and control (35 persons) groups from august 2019 to february 2020. research tools included a demographic and obstetric questionnaire and a researcher-made childbearing intention questionnaire based on tpb. the intervention group received three 110-min sessions of education, which was based on tpb. the control group received routine health center care. the study data were analyzed by using the kolmogorov-smirnov, shapiro-wilk, independent t-test, mann-whitney u test, repeated measures analysis of variance (anova), freidman test, post hoc tests of bonferroni and dunn, the spearman rank correlation coefficient, and the generalized estimating equation (gee) model. results: the mean±sd age of the participants were 32.6±4.7 and 32.9±4.7 years in the intervention and control groups, respectively, and most of the women had university-level education in both groups. changes in childbearing intention from the pre-intervention stage were significantly higher in the intervention group than the control group immediately (p=0.001) and then one month after the intervention (p=0.001). the results of the gee model showed that the childbearing intention was significantly higher in the intervention group (β=0.68, 95% ci; 0.449-0.911, p=0.001,), and there was a significant positive relationship between attitude and childbearing (β=0.023, 95% ci; 0.013-0.033, p=0.001). conclusion: education based on the theory of planned behavior increased childbearing intention in single-child women in this study, so this educational program is advised for promoting childbearing.