[Effect of pre-marriage counseling on the sexual health]

ABSTRACT

Regarding the increase of sexual transmitted disease, high risk behaviour and unwanted pregnancy in one hand, and myth, incorrect believes and low knowledge about sexuality in the other hand, sexual health education is one the basic compartment of health promotion. The pre-marriage counseling is one of the best opportunities to reach our aim. This was a semi-practical study. We had considered 32 case couples and 32 control couples randomly. The couples had been chosen from those, which have been contacted to the clinics of Tehran University of medical sciences. All cases had contributed to three lectures given by the researcher. The lectures were mainly based on the different aspects of sexual health, like family plain, safe sex, different aspects of sexuality and physiologic different in men's and women's. On the other hand the control group had taken the normal lectures, which presents in the clinics which were based on the family planning and pre-marriage experiments. Both groups [cases and controls] had been asked to fill a form six months after counseling. In this form, we had included 10 questions of sexual health and 10 demographic questions. We had finally analyzed our data by SPSS software where we had used descriptive and discriminated statistics. We have obtained a considerable difference in sexual health between the two groups by Man-Whitney test [p=0.000]. The majority of case group [96.9%] showed a good sexual health whereas the most procent of control group [59.4%] had a moderate sexual health. To improve the quality of pre-marriage counseling, the content of usual lectures should be modified in addition to consider more time for these lectures. The results revealed that the pre-marriage counseling enhances the sexual health that lead to marital satisfaction