Effectiveness of a school-based peer-led education program on high school students’ health behavior in a boarding school in Bali, Indonesia

Abstract

Abstract School-based health promotion is an effort to combine health education with other relevant factors that contribute to fostering students’ health behaviors as the main prerequisite to create a health-promoting school. An alternative to a conventional health education method is peer-led education. This study aimed to determine the effect of a school-based peer-led education program on health behaviors among high school students in a boarding school located in a rural area in Bali, Indonesia. This study used a one-group pretest-posttest design with a purposive sampling technique, and sampling was conducted among all students of the target boarding school grades 10–12. Respondents were requested to complete a self-administered questionnaire before and after the intervention. The questionnaire was adapted from an existing instrument (Health-Promoting Lifestyle Profile II/HPLP-II) consisting of 52 items. A 4-week intervention was delivered by peer educators who had completed a 10-day training program given by the research team in collaboration with practitioners from the local health office. The intervention was based on Pender's health promotion model. A paired t-test on the total HPLP-II scores yielded a non-significant result of t = −1.967 and p = .054 (p > .05). Physical activity (t = −2.722, p = .008) and health responsibility (z = −4.848, p = .008) domains showed significant results (p