Health Promoting Lifestyles among Adolescents: A Gender Perspective Study

Health is something which influences a person's whole life directly or indirectly because it includes all the aspects of life such as physical, mental, social, and spiritual. Lifestyle of any individual leaves its marks on not only an individual's physical health but on personal, professional, psychological, emotional, spiritual, social as well economical part of life. Adolescence is a period which is full of hormonal, physical as well as psychological changes. In the same way, gender also influences the lifestyle of an individual due to different factors related to it. Males and females both have different habits, choices, schedules, routines, responsibilities and different challenges so their lifestyle is. The purpose of this study was to investigate gender differences in health-promoting lifestyles among adolescents. The sample included in the present study was of 600 adolescents of which 300 were male and 300 were female (16-19 years). The data in the present study was collected with the help of Health Promoting Lifestyle Profile-II developed by Walker et al. (1996) to achieve the study objectives and then, the obtained data from the sample was put to statistical analysis and inferences were made. The total mean of all 52 items describes the overall health promoting lifestyle. The total mean score of male was (M=23.08, SD=3.880) and the mean of female was (M=23.94, SD=4.328) with the mean difference of -.867[t (598) = -2.582, p<.010] depicting the significant gender difference. The scores of significant mean difference on health promoting lifestyles of female adolescents are higher than male adolescents which are also supported by many previous research studies. In conclusion, we can say that female adolescents have better health promoting lifestyles than male adolescents.