Women are fundamental to the health of families and communities, and are of particular importance in ensuring and sustaining family and community health [1]. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is a fundamental human right, and many women in the world are deprived of that fundamental right [2]. Women must maintain and improve their health and well-being to be able to perform their care effectively [3].
The role of individual, behavioral and social factors in creating healthy behaviors has been studied to date. Self-efficacy is one of the individual and behavioral factors that has high predictive power in generating health behaviors. Self-efficacy is the confidence that one feels about a particular activity [6]. Another important predictor of health-promoting behaviors is social support [7]. Social support is meant to establish social interaction that begins with communication and continues with it, leading to empathetic communication and ultimately to the patient's safety net [8].
Individuals need to be able to identify, understand, fulfill or adapt to their needs in order to achieve full physical, mental, and social well-being. This definition emphasizes health promotion as a process by which people can control their health [13].
The issue of informal settlements and suburbs is also one of the problems of large cities which has a negative impact on people's health by creating an inappropriate environment [14]. The purpose of this study was to determine the status of health promoting behaviors and its relationship with self-efficacy and social support in women in suburban households.

 

The present study is a descriptive-analytical and cross-sectional one that was done in 2017. The statistical population consisted of all women heads of suburban households in Urmia city. Sample size was determined by simple random method and based on Cochran formula n = (t2 pqN) / [(n-1) d2 + t2pq] 384 individuals were selected. In this study, the inclusion criteria included being a resident of the city of Urmia, the head of the household at the time of completing the questionnaire, consent to participate in the study, and no background in psychiatric ward. Individuals who did not wish to participate in the study or did not have sufficient time to respond to the questionnaire or complete the questionnaire were not included in the study.
Health Promotion Lifestyle Profile II (HPLP-II) standard questionnaire was used to assess health-promoting behaviors. In our study, we used the Iranian version of Mohhamadi et al., Which reported a Cronbach's alpha coefficient of 0.5 [16]. The average time for filling out the questionnaires was 30-45 minutes for each person and the total questionnaire was 3 months. Finally, descriptive statistics, Pearson and Kendall correlation coefficients and linear regression were used for data analysis by SPSS software version 25 (SPSS Inc., Chicago, Illinois, USA).

The mean of total health promoting behaviors was 111.62±20.45 (Table 1). Self-efficacy, perceived social support and demographic characteristics of marriage and education had a significant positive correlation with health promoting behaviors (P<0.001) (Table 2), but there was no significant positive correlation between occupation and age with health promoting behaviors (Table 3).
 

Table 1. Mean scores of health-promoting behaviors in six dimensions and self-efficacy and social support among women in suburban households


Table 2. Evaluation of the correlation between health promoting behaviors and self-efficacy and social support


Table 3: Examine the relationship between health promoting behaviors and demographic characteristics

 

The results of this study showed that the status of health promoting behaviors was moderate and low in female-headed households and they had the highest score and the lowest score in terms of responsibility and nutrition respectively, which was in line with Mohammadbeigi et al., and Abedi et al. [19]. In the study of Wei et al., And Raiyat et al., the lowest score was related to health responsibility, which was inconsistent with the results of this study [22,21].

 

According to the findings of this research, health authorities and health care providers can cause the self-efficacy to increase in female heads of households by designing health promoting education programs. Also governmental organizations and families with supplying necessary emotional supports can provide an area of social support increase and consequently, a change in behavior, for suburbanized female heads of households.

 

The authors are grateful to the respected chairmanship of the Urmia Health Center and the staff of the Urmia Comprehensive Health Services Center for their assistance and cooperation in this research. This article is the result of a thesis by Soheila Najafi at Urmia University of Medical Sciences, carried out from 2017 to 2018, and was funded by her.

 

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.