’We Can Do It!’ – the Mental Health Promoting Effect of Female Communities

Women have to cope with multiple roles (household duties and workplace responsibilities) resulting at more mental and somatic health risks like stress and worse health status (Ádám, Cserháti, Balogh and Kopp, 2010; Nistor et al, 2015). However, to balance this effect women are more health conscious and effective in health communication - they willingly report on any changes in their health status (Caroli and Weber-Baghdiguian, 2016; Susánszky, Susánszky and Kopp, 2009).

Community mental health promotion is becoming more and more important (Erdei and Lippai, 2014), so our research aims at investigating the activities and participants of a self-organized workplace leisure group initiated by the researchers themselves. Our target group consists of volunteering women working at the Dean's Office of the Juhász Gyula Faculty of Education at the University of Szeged, Hungary. The observed group is heterogeneous by age and education. We would like to study how the strength of the community affects the mental health of the examined sample, whether the group is able to and to what extent reduce the effects of everyday stress.

The mental health status of the participants will be measured before and after the community program, as well as the activities of the self-organized ‘female club’ will be monitored. We believe that by utilising the methodology of workplace health promotion and building on the strength of the community, our research will clearly underline the positive impact of community-based mental health promotion on the female group under study. The research results can provide the bases of a workplace health promotion project to be extended to the complete teaching and non-teaching female staff of the faculty.