Abstract

Introduction Type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) is the most common chronic metabolic disease in childhood and adolescence. The increasing use of social networks among adolescents provides a unique opportunity to implement self-care educational programs for improving self-efficacy in diabetic adolescents in terms of awareness, attitude, and performance. Objective This study aimed to assess the effectiveness of a self-care educational program provided by mobile-based social networking (MBSN) on the self-efficacy of diabetic adolescent girls. Methods A quasi-experimental study with 76 Iranian 14- to 18-year-old girls with T1DM was conducted in 2018-2019. The subjects were selected with aconvenient sampling method and randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups. The MBSN was applied to implement a self-care educational program in the experimental group for 12 weeks. The Diabetes Management Self-Efficacy Scale (DMSES) questionnaire with the main domains of blood sugar control (BSC), diet control (DC), medical care (MC), and exercise was used to evaluate the self-efficacy level before and 4 weeks after the intervention. Results The mean age and T1DM duration of participants were 15.9 +/- 1.5 and 7.24 +/- 3.9 years, respectively. No significant difference in the self-efficacy of the two groups before the intervention was found. The self-efficacy level in the experimental group was increased after the intervention so that there was a significant difference in this parameter between the experimental and control groups (p < 0.0001). Three DMSES domains of BSC (p = 0.003), DC (p = 0.011), and MC (p = 0.016) after the intervention significantly differed between the two groups. Conclusion As the self-care education with MBSN significantly increased the self-efficacy level of girls with T1DM, this technique would be a complementary of health care in educating and supporting diabetic patients in other age groups.