The Relationship between Health-Promoting Lifestyle, Mental Health, Coping Styles and Religious Orientation among Isfahan University Students

Individual’s lifestyle affects health. Health-Promoting Lifestyle promotes health and welfare, induces satisfaction, self-persuasion and self-improvement. Physical, mental and spiritual health of students as future human resources of each country has particular importance in order to improve and promote it. This study was conducted to determine the relationship between health-promoting lifestyle, mental health, coping styles and religious orientation among Isfahan university students.Methods and Materials: The study population consisted of the whole Isfahan university students. 94 students (47 females and 47 males), were randomly selected and filled out health-promoting lifestyle profile (HPLPII), general health questionnaire-28(GHQ-28), ways of coping questionnaire (WOCQ) and Azarbaijani’s religious orientation with reliance on Islam test. The data were analyzed using correlation coefficient, Multiple Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) and regression. There was a negative significant relationship between health-promoting lifestyle and mental health and between mental health and religious orientation (P<0.01). Lower scores on the GHQ-28 is indicator of more mental health. There was a positive significant relationship between health-promoting lifestyle and religious orientation. Furthermore, the results showed that there was no significant difference between the scores of males and females in health-promoting lifestyle and mental health, But there was a significant difference between them in rites-beliefs subscale in religious orientation and the emotion-focused coping style (P<0.05). The results of regression showed that the emotion-focused coping style and social dysfunction subscales had significant portion in explaining health-promoting lifestyle (P<0.01). Regarding to the lifestyle evolving in Iran and the situation of health-promoting behaviors among students, it’s relation with the religious dimension and coping styles design and implementation of health education programs among different groups of people, especially students, is recommended.