Sexuality across the Lifecycle
A study on educational intervention in adolescents' sexual perspectives.
Acosta Ramirez, Giselle *,,
ABSTRACT- An unwanted pregnancy is an issue that concerns the couple, the family and society; however, in developing countries this responsibility relies fundamentally on the women. If we add to this condition the one of being an adolescent, we could obtain an even more unfavorable bio-psycho-social situation, worsened in many cases by the lack of the male's responsibility. Thereby, we decided to carry out an educational program to increase the level of knowledge of sexuality and contraception in adolescents of both sexes, from a sample of 82 students attending the "The Chutalitos" high school in Chinaca, Huehuetenango, Guatemala between July and December, 2004. Once we obtained the written consent of the participants parents, we asked the students to complete a questionnaire, which was designed to measure their basic knowledge on sexuality and contraception. As it was expected, we found strong deficiencies in the answers of more than 90% of the participants. Then, we decided to apply educational interventions by means of exhibitions, dynamic grouped activities, conferences/workshops among others, in order to deliver scientific information about sexuality, safe sexual practices, and birth-control methods. When promoting health, we tried to favorably change the adolescents perception of the topic, so that they could incorporate healthy behaviors into their daily lifestyles, thus, working in this way to get positive changes not only in the present but in the future. Once the program culminated, the same questionnaire was applied again and found a substantial improvement in the grading of responses with 81% of the participants showing a satisfactory qualification, a statistically significant level that credited the quality of the intervention. The statistical package used was Epiinfo 6.0, applying the test of McNemar for statistical differences among categorical variables. Once the analysis and results were completed, they were compared with other studies, including a similar work previously done by the authors in a rural area in Guantanamo, Cuba, where the initial level of knowledge about the same topic was greater among the participants than in Guatemala. This was believed to be attributable to the fact of a better sexual education at early ages of adolescence.
Key words: adolescence, sexuality, contraception, educational, intenvention