The Effectiveness of Encouragement Education on Diabetic Quality of Life and Emotional Behavioral Disorders in Adolescents with Diabetes

Diabetes disease as one major problem of the health system in the world is a one metabolic and chronic disease that adolescents with it face many psychological, emotional and social problems and disorders. As a result, present study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of encouragement education on diabetic quality of life and emotional behavioral disorders in adolescents with diabetes.

This research was quasi-experimental with pretest, posttest and two-month follow-up design with control group. The research population was adolescents with diabetes of members of the Tehran Diabetes Association in 2019 year. Among them 30 diabetic adolescents were selected by simple random sampling method and randomly replaced in two equal groups. The experimental group underwent encouragement education for 10 sessions of 45 minutes and the control group did not receive any training. The research instruments were the Burroughs and et al diabetic quality of life brief inventory (2004) and Achenbach and Rescorla emotional behavioral disorders scale (2001). Data were analyzed by chi-square, repeated measures analysis of variance and Bonferroni post hoc test in the SPSS-21 software version.

The findings showed that the encouragement education led to increased diabetic quality of life (F=21.02, P<0.001) and decreased internalizing emotional behavioral disorders (F=25.68, P<0.001) in adolescents with diabetes, but had no significant effect on their externalizing emotional behavioral disorders (F=3.17, P=0.071). In addition, the effectiveness of encouragement education remained in the follow-up phase on increasing diabetic quality of life (F=33.28, P<0.001) and decreasing internalizing emotional behavioral disorders (F=49.59, P<0.001) and lack of effect on externalizing emotional behavioral disorders (F=2.35, P=0.094) in adolescents with diabetes.

Regarded to the results, health professionals and therapists can use the method of encouragement education along with other educational methods to improve health-related psychological characteristics, especially increase diabetic quality of life and decrease internalizing disorders.