PURPOSE: This cross-sectional study was designed to explore the relationship among social support, experienced stressful life events and health behaviors of Korean undergraduate students, and validate the mediator effect of social support. METHOD: One thousand four hundred fifty-three undergraduate students were randomly selected from five universities located in the middle area of Korea. RESULT: The health behaviors of Korean undergraduates tend to have unhealthy patterns. In the case of the students living without family, experiencing more stressful life events and perceiving lower social support, health behaviors are poor. The relationship between perceived social supports, the frequency of the experienced stressful life events and the score of health behavior patterns is statistically significant. After controlling the effect of social support, the correlation coefficient between the frequency of experienced stressful life events and the score of health behavior patterns was slightly lower. The score of health behaviors between the group with an extremely high score of social support and the group with an extremely low score were statistically significantly different. CONCLUSION: Future studies need to be pursued to develop various strategies such as a health education programs and counseling programs for health maintenance and health promotion of undergraduates.

This study was conducted to test whether a comprehensive health promotion program for rheumatoid arthritis (CHPRRA) affected patients' health promotion strategies and knowledge about the disease, thus leading to the improvement of health status by using repeated measure of quasi- experiment design. Eighteen RA patients who visited the RA clinic of an university hospital located in Inchon were invited to participate in the CHPPRA. According to the study results, it was shown that the CHPPRA had significant effects on the patients' health status such as pain, depression, and functional disability. Also, that the improvement of health status was achieved by a positive change in the four health promotion strategies, which consisted of goal setting, positive thinking, exercise, and knowledge about the disease. Goal setting, positive thinking, and knowledge about the disease could also affect the patients' depression. Thus it can be interpreted that the improvement of these strategies may result in a remarkable decrease of depression. In addition, alleviation of functional disability may be due to increase of exercise. However although the strategies which were directly associated with pain management were not significantly improved, pain was significantly reduced. On the other hand, the study result showed that the other health promotion strategies included in CHPPRA such as pain management, positive thinking, stress management, asking for assistance and communication were not significantly increased. although the health status such as pain, depression, and functional disability, which are final goals of the program, were significantly improved through the exposition of patients to those health promotion strategies.