Abstract:
Sexual behavior among female junior high school students in rural areas is one important issue that
needs to be addressed. A program promoting life skills to prevent sexual behavior among female school students
could be a promising measure to solve this problem. This quasi-experimental research, of a two-group pretestposttest
design, aimed to study the effectiveness of a life skills promoting program to prevent sexual behavior
among female grade 7 and 8 students. The samples composed 105 students, 55 in the experimental group and 50
students in the comparison group. The experimental group participated in the life skills promoting program while
the comparison group received the normal sex education lesson organized in the classroom. A questionnaire was
used for collecting data and the data were analyzed by using statistics regarding frequency, percentage,
arithmetic mean, paired sample t-test, and independent t-test.
The research results showed that after the experimental group participated in the program, increased
mean scores of the experimental group were found in regard to knowledge about sex education and skills to resist
having sexual behavior (p<0.001), even though the change of the mean score of students self-esteem toward the
prevention of having sexual behavior during school age, awareness of negative effects of sexual behavior during
school age, and actions to prevent sexual behavior were not found to be significant. However, changes in some
aspects were found among the experimental group which may help to lower the chance of having sexual behavior
during school age; for example, the increased self-esteem of those who had never had sexual behaviors, an
increased feeling of being a good role model because of not having sexual behavior during school age, having an
awareness that sexual behavior during school age is an abnormal action, and avoiding going out with a boyfriend.
In order to apply this type of program effectively to other groups of female junior high school students
that have a similar context, the director of the program should participate closely with the students with love and
sincerity in order to develop mutual trust since sex-related content is very sensitive. Besides this, teaching methods
should be relevantly organized and modified for daily lifestyles of the target students, and long-term behavioral
surveillance should also be done. Self-regulation theory should also be applied for furthering the research project
in order to develop this type of the program. Encouraging families or community volunteers to participate in the
program for more adequate follow-up, and behavioral surveillance programs to prevent sexual behavior among
female students should be done