The self-efficacy improvement in adolescent girls with type 1 diabetes mellitus with self-care education through mobile-based social networking

Abstract

Type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) is the most common chronic metabolic disease in childhood and adolescence. The increasing use of social networks among adolescents provides a unique opportunity to implement self-care educational programs for improving self-efficacy in diabetic adolescents in terms of awareness, attitude, and performance. This study aimed to assess the effectiveness of a self-care educational program provided by mobile-based social networking (MBSN) on the self-efficacy of diabetic adolescent girls. A quasi-experimental study with 76 Iranian 14- to 18-year-old girls with T1DM was conducted in 2018–2019. The subjects were selected with aconvenient sampling method and randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups. The MBSN was applied to implement a self-care educational program in the experimental group for 12 weeks. The Diabetes Management Self-Efficacy Scale (DMSES) questionnaire with the main domains of blood sugar control (BSC), diet control (DC), medical care (MC), and exercise was used to evaluate the self-efficacy level before and 4 weeks after the intervention. The mean age and T1DM duration of participants were 15.9 ± 1.5 and 7.24 ± 3.9 years, respectively. No significant difference in the self-efficacy of the two groups before the intervention was found. The self-efficacy level in the experimental group was increased after the intervention so that there was a significant difference in this parameter between the experimental and control groups (p < 0.0001). Three DMSES domains of BSC (p = 0.003), DC (p = 0.011), and MC (p = 0.016) after the intervention significantly differed between the two groups. As the self-care education with MBSN significantly increased the self-efficacy level of girls with T1DM, this technique would be a complementary of health care in educating and supporting diabetic patients in other age groups.