Peer Education and Health Promotion: Evidence base perspective

Introduction:The importance of health-promoting behaviors is discussed in all ages. Health education is a necessary and integrated part of health promotion and could have a positive impact on people’s lifestyles. Peer education is one of the educational methods which is considered as a behavior change strategy and cause to share knowledge and experience among people in the same group. In this educational approach, due to the similar characteristics of the members, simple and reliable learning is created. Methods & Materials:This narrative review is done by keywords "Peer education And Health promotion", "Education And Health behavior", "Peer education And Well-being", during ۲۰۱۲-۲۰۲۲, in PubMed, Google scholar, Elsevier, ProQuest, Scopus and Science Direct databases.Results:Results show that Peer education improves the knowledge, attitude, health behavior and self-efficacy of people and as a result, it will promote the health. Peer education is an effective way to create healthy behavioral changes in important health areas, including individual responsibility for health and social support. Regarding the easy transfer of information between peers, promotion of communication, low cost and simplicity of this method, peer education is recommended to be used in educational programs. It is also possible to achieve better results by providing more facilities, encouragement and supervision in the group under peer education.Disscussion:Peer education is a suitable educational method which could have positive effects on awareness, attitude and health behaviors. Some studies have also doubted the effectiveness of peer education. This difference can be due to the selection of peer educators and the process of implementing the intervention. The use of the peer group should depend on the content of the subject of education, because it can be more effective in specific issues. However, according to the different results, it seems that more studies are needed in this direction.

کلیدواژه ها:

Peer education ، Health promotion ، Health behavior