Designing a Virtual-Social Learning Environment for Awareness about Diabetes and Its Effectiveness on the Knowledge and Self-efficacy of Male Students’ Mothers

Diabetes is a type of metabolic diseases whose common characteristic is the increase in blood sugar. It is dangerous and very common in the world, especially in Iran. Research on people’s awareness of this disease is scarce. The purpose of this study was to design a virtual-social educational environment for awareness of diabetes and its effectiveness on the knowledge and self-efficacy of male students’ mothers.

Multi-stage cluster sampling was used and a total of 30 mothers were selected. These mothers were divided into experimental and control groups. (Each group involved 15 people). A pretest of knowledge about diabetes and self-efficacy was given to all mothers qualified for the study. All mothers in the experimental group were given diabetes training in 12 sessions, and the control group did not receive any training. For data analysis, descriptive statistics, mean, frequency and standard deviation were used at the end of the training sessions. Covariance analysis was used in inferential statistics using SPSS version 25.

The results of the hypothesis review through covariance analysis indicate that the special virtual-social learning environment for diabetes awareness has an impact on the knowledge and Self-efficacy of Male Student’s mothers and has increased it at a significance level of 1%.

It was concluded that that the virtual social-educational environment raises people’s awareness of diabetes. Similar studies are recommended for other organizations like high schools, universities, public and private sectors. These studies can have a positive effect on psychological health of society.