Health Curriculum’s Neglect of Puberty Health, the Lived Experiences of Twelfth Grade Female Students

Puberty health includes principles that lead to the monitoring and promotion of physical and mental health, and it is necessary to provide the necessary training to teenagers in this field. The current study has investigated the lived experience of female students from the neglect of puberty health in the health and hygiene curriculum.

This study is based on a qualitative approach and a descriptive phenomenology method, by studying students' lived experiences. Based on this, in 2022, the lived experiences of 19 twelfth-grade students have been investigated in West Azerbaijan and East Azerbaijan provinces using semi-structured interviews. The selection of participants has been done using the purposeful snowball sampling method. In order to verify the trustworthiness of the research information, the reliability criterion was used with two review methods by 12 participants and a review by 4 non-participating experts in the research. For the analysis of the data, Colaizzi’s strategy has been used.

From the data analysis, 237 codes, 7 themes, and 56 sub-themes were obtained. The themes extracted from the research are general neglect of puberty education, the overcoming of traditional cultural limitations, the one-dimensionality of puberty education, the high skills of medical staff, unrealistic expectations from adolescents, obstacles to puberty education, and the necessity of puberty education.

Planning puberty health education based on the strengths of the medical staff, realism towards puberty, and public attention to its education is a necessity.