Study of Life Skills Access Rate of Iranian Adolescents

Nowadays, despite deep cultural affairs and life styles, many individuals particularly adolescents are not equipped with basic necessary capabilities and skills required for confronting with their everyday life problems.Learning life skills enables individuals to effectively encounter every day life problems and challenges, cope with tensions, and show compatibility behaviors. Due to the changes adolescents experience at the period of puberty, acquiring life skills is so essential and important. This paper is an attempt to investigate the access rate of Iranian adolescents to life skills. A sample of 940 participants from among the population of Iranian guidanceschool students were selected through stratified random selection procedure out of 18 cities in 6 provinces. Questionnaire was employed for data collection. The results of data analysis show that the life skills access rate among all adolescents were lower than mean (cut-point), but for many factors, there is no significant difference between the life skills access rate of male vs. female adolescents. The paper concludesthat the general educational system in Iran has not been successful in achieving the goals of teaching life skills to adolescents.