Sex Education: teachers' social representations, conceptions and practices

Abstract

School Sex Education is nowadays an important public health issue as it concerns not only youth AIDS prevention (and other sexually transmitted infections) and adolescent pregnancy prevention but also interpersonal relationships and psychosocial issues. Therefore school sex education contributes to promote better citizenship. The European FP6 Biohead-Citizen research project aims to understand how biology, health and environmental education can contribute to improve citizenship. It analyses the social representations and practices of teachers in several countries, focusing on their differences and associating them to controlled parameters (e.g. social context, religion, gender). In this communication we analyse data concerning teachers’ and future teachers’ conceptions on the topic of sex education derived from a questionnaire that was constructed and tested during the first year of the project. The questionnaire was completed by 6001 teachers and future teachers from 15 countries. We used statistical multivariate analysis, a method that has become standard for investigating complex data derived from many individuals that needs to be analysed according to many variables (here we used the responses to the questions as variables). The results show that the factors that correlate more closely with the teachers’ and future teachers’ conceptions are religion, the level of belief in god and the level of religious practices. It was also found that the level of teaching (primary versus secondary school) is also correlated with different conceptions on sex education. Detailed results will be presented and discussed.