Evaluation of Lifestyle Health Promotion of Dormitory Medical Students Regarding Comprehensive Aspects

Objective: Lifestyle improvement has a key role in empowering people and facilitating their duties. Most of the students who live in the dormitories, are apparently not locals and their lifestyle improvement is even more essential to increase their efficiency and productivity. The aim of this study is to assess health-promoting lifestyle of medical sciences students who live in dormitory with respect to different aspects such as nutritional status, stress management, physical activity, health responsibility, social support and perception of life. Moreover the results are provided separately for male and female students and compared with each other. Materials and Method: In this paper, an analytical descriptive study was conducted with 220 students who live in dormitory and random stratified sampling was used. Data collection was based on a standard health-promoting lifestyle questionnaire. The minimum lifestyle score was 52 and the maximum score was 208. The validity of the Persian version of health-promoting lifestyle has been done by Mohammadi Zeidi et al. Cronbach alpha of 0.85 were obtained for all of the questionnaires and the data were analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics®. Results: Average scores of the male and female students" lifestyle were moderate (122.63 ± 25.18). The lowest score was related to the physical activity of female students (16.71 ± 4.47) and the highest score was for the social support between male students (23.71 ± 4.09). Independent t test showed that the difference between the means of nutrition and health responsibility for male and female students were significant (P = 0.05). Pearson correlation coefficient showed that there is a relationship between all aspects of lifestyle (P = 0.01). It is investigated that there is relationship between gender and physical activity by doing a regression. Conclusion: Considering the fact that the students had an average score of health promoting lifestyle, paying attention to the health education and the behaviors related to the health promotion of this population is more essential and cost-effective