Effectiveness of Self-awareness based Individual counseling on self-awareness of women in reproductive age

Introduction: Self-awareness skills enable people to better identify their personality traits, needs, wants, goals, weak points, and emotions. Considering the importance of this skill, the present research investigates the effectiveness of self-awareness based individual counseling on self-awareness of women in reproductive age. Materials and methods: This randomized field trial was conducted on 76 women in reproductive age referring to the health center of Gorgan City in 2016. The samples were selected based on convenience sampling and based on permuted block randomization, were assigned to two groups, intervention and control. The needed information was supplied by asking the participants to complete the Persian version of the self-awareness questionnaire of Realo and Allik before and one month after the intervention. The intervention group was subjected to six sessions of individual counseling through an eclecticism approach. The collected data, based on their normality or non-normality, were analyzed through the independent t-test, and Mann-Whitney and Wilcoxon tests in SPSS16 software. Findings: No statistically significant difference was observed between the self-awareness score before and after the counseling in the control group (52.21 +/- 7.62 and 53.81 +/- 7.63, respectively) while the difference was significant in the intervention group (56.10 +/- 10.02 and 60.13 +/- 10.43, respectively, p-value<0.009). Moreover, there was a statistically significant difference between the average scores of private self-awareness, public self-awareness, and social anxiety in the intervention group before and after the counseling, while this difference was not significant in the control group. Conclusion: The self-awareness based individual counseling session shows a positive effect on enhancing private and public self-awareness and reducing social anxiety. Considering the role of self-awareness in enabling the women to deal with their problems and express their needs effectively, this counseling approach is recommended for improving the self-awareness skills of women, particularly those in the reproductive age.