Abstract

Background: Health education as a way to improve people's attitudes towards health issues could persuade people to change harmful behaviors that lead to health problems. Television in Iran is responsible for health education.The main propose of this study was pathological evaluation of health education programs on TV and highlighting their content barriers.

Methods: content analysis as a qualitative method was used for this study. For content analysis combination of deductive and inductive methods were used.  Four categories of health education programs, medical, psychological, cookery and sport, were observed and recorded for one week, 10 hours a day (214 hours in total). SPSS was used for data analysis.

Results: During the study period, 8.72 to 15.89 percent of TV programs were allocated to health education. Findings demonstrated that minimum amount of time was dedicated to sport education with just 15 minutes per day or % 0.6 of all the programs and maximum amount of time was allocated to cuisine with 2 hours or % 5/5.

Conclusions: In this part ofstudy, for pathological analysis of health education programs on TV a number of items such as hypochondria, doctor and patient relationship, habituation, denial (as defense mechanism), underestimating positive psychology, shortness of cooking and sports programs were evaluated. According to the findings of this study, necessary reforms should be performed in the quality of programs for health promotion in the society.

Key words: Education, Health, Iran, Television program, Content analysis.