evaluation of the health action process approach to improve mothers' parenting skills

background: a positive parenting program with health action process approach was applied for the parents that their children are at the risk of behavioral and emotional disorders, and the aim of this study is to investigate the application of health action process approach for improving mother's parenting skills. methods: the research has done for the mothers of children who aged between 3 and 8 year old. the sample size of 120 was estimated. a random multi-stage cluster sampling was done. for data gathering, a questionnaire was designed based on structures of the health action process approach and osce. content and face validity of questionnaire and check lists are approved by a panel of experts and construction validity was obtained by confirmatory factor analysis. reliability of measurements is tested by cronbach's alpha. the collected data were analyzed using spssibm21 statistical software. findings: chi-square test showed that between intervention and non-intervention groups, there were significant differences about the mean behavior and parenting skills before and after intervention. independent t-tests indicated that after educational intervention, mean scores for both groups were significantly different and logistic regression analysis results showed that the structure of the model described 53.1 to 71.9 percent of parenting skills variance, and the model showed a good fit. conclusions: according to the research, it can be inferred that the intervention that was designed based on the structure of the health action process approach, had a positive impact on improving parenting skills of mothers and has increased their performance affectedly. thus, this model can be used for educational planning related to family training specially parenting skills. key words : health action process approach, parenting skills, mothers