puberty health education and female students’ self-efficacy

Background: adolescence is an essential period in every human rsquo;s life. the lack of knowledge on puberty issues may adversely impact an adolescent rsquo;s future mental health and selfefficacy. the present study aimed to determine the effect of puberty health education on the general selfefficacy of female students.methods: this was a quasiexperimental study with a pretest; posttest and a control group design. this study was conducted on 100 female students of public schools with the onset of menstruation in 2018 in ghaemshahr city, iran. to prevent data contamination, the control group was selected from another similar public school. the required data were collected by sherer general selfefficacy questionnaire and analyzed by spss using statistics, including mean, standard deviation, chisquared test, fisher rsquo;s exact test, oneway analysis of variance (anova), and paired samples ttest.results: the study groups were matched for demographic variables except for the mother rsquo;s age (p=0.01) and father rsquo;s education (p=0.001). selfefficacy was not low in any of the groups before and after the training. mean ±sd pretraining selfefficacy scores in the intervention (63.68 ±9.72) and control (65.3 ±8.78) groups were not statistically significant (p=0.69). comparing the students rsquo; selfefficacy mean pretestposttest scores revealed a significant difference in the intervention group (p=0.017); however, there was no significant change in the control group (p=0.284) in this respect. comparing betweengroup mean selfefficacy changes concerning before and after the intervention values suggested no significant difference (p=0.294).conclusion: puberty health education was effective in promoting the explored female students rsquo; selfefficacy. accordingly, it is recommended to include puberty education in female students rsquo; courses. in addition, community health nurses are suggested to include this training in their programs.