The effects of a peer-led training program on female students’ self-esteem in public secondary schools in Shiraz

Introduction: low self-esteem in adolescence is one of the risk factors fornegative outcomes in important domains of adulthood life. due to the lackof trials based on modern methods of teaching in the field of self-esteem, thisstudy aimed to investigate the effects of a peer-led training program on femalesecond graders’ self-esteem in public secondary schools in shiraz.methods: the present study is an educational randomized controlled trial. 223public school female students in the second grade were selected with the multistagerandom cluster sampling method. the selected schools were assignedrandomly to experimental and control groups. the data were collected before,one and six weeks after an intervention in the control and experimental group,using pope’s 5-scale test of self-esteem with cronbakh’s alpha reliability of0.85. the educational intervention in the experimental group was a peer-ledapproach, using discussion techniques in small groups (the group work, roleplay and group play) and a 5-volume training manual. the data were analyzedthrough spss, version 14, using mann-whitney test, chi-square test, wilcoxonand repeated measurements.results: the results showed that the mean of total self-esteem scores and thesub-scales (except for family self-esteem) in the experimental groups comparedto that in the control groups, one and six weeks after the peer-led based approachintervention was significantly different [p < 0.001]. before the intervention, themean for self-esteem in the experimental groups was 51.80±13.91 but in thefirst post-test and second post-test the mean increased to 73.72±12.94, and69.48±12.63, respectively. before the educational intervention, the frequencydistribution of females’ self-esteem in the experimental and control groupsdid not differ significantly from each other (p=0.340). but during one and sixweeks after the intervention, a significant increase was observed between thetwo groups (p < 0.001).conclusion: the results of this study suggest that peer education is an effectiveway to promote self-esteem in adolescents. providing opportunities such as apeer-led approach can help adolescents to acquire practical ways to increasetheir self-esteem.