A Study to Evaluate the Effectiveness of Planned Teaching Programme on Impact of Early Marriage, Pregnancy among Adolescent Girls in Selected Rural High Schools of Belgaum, Karnataka

Marriage is found in all cultures. It is a process by which individuals select their life partners. In India adolescents girls face number of problems such as dropout of school, malnourished, working in vulnerable situations, misguidance from peer group and siblings, more prone for early marriage and are sexually active. Early (child) Marriage is one of the burning problems of Indian society. In India, despite amended laws advocating 18 as the legal minimum age at marriage for females, a substantial proportion i.e. every third adolescent girl in the age group of 15-19 year is married and every second married adolescent girl has given birth to a child.

OBJECTIVES: To assess the knowledge and attitude, also to design and implement and to know the effectiveness of planned teaching programme on impact of early marriage, pregnancy among adolescent girls. To correlate, find the association between knowledge and attitude with selected demographic variables on impact of early marriage, pregnancy among adolescent girls.

MATERIALS AND METHODS: This was a true experimental study conducted to assess the effectiveness of planned teaching programme among 60 adolescent girls (aged between 13year to 17year, either married and unmarried) who were studying in 8th, 9th and10th standard from selected rural high schools of Belgaum, Karnataka using Probability-simple random sampling technique. A questionnaire was designed to tap the information about on impact of early marriage, pregnancy and planned teaching program was been conducted to assess the knowledge and attitude of adolescent girls.

RESULTS: the present study showed that significant gain in knowledge of experimental group after the planned teaching programme on impact of early marriage, pregnancy. The mean score of knowledge of experimental group is 33.03± 1.86 and mean score of knowledge of control group 23.86±3.44.The mean attitude score of experimental group is 37.93±4.78. It indicates that the knowledge of adolescents girls on impact of early marriage, pregnancy is positively correlated with attitude (r = 0.386 P>0.05).

CONCLUSION: The findings of this study support the need of delaying early marriage for the better health of the mother as well as baby. The study proved that there was a significant correlation between knowledge and attitude of adolescent girls.