Validating the Teacher Sexuality Education Questionnaire Scales to Assess Educators’ Preparedness to Deliver CSE to Young People with Disabilities

Abstract

AbstractComprehensive sexuality education (CSE) is instrumental in ensuring that young people have the knowledge and skills to make informed decisions and practice safer sex. Worryingly, CSE is often not available to adolescents and young with disabilities. The Breaking the Silence (BtS) approach to CSE was developed to address this gap and help equip educators to teach CSE to adolescents and young people with disabilities. The TSE-Q was designed to evaluate the effectiveness of the BtS approach and monitor changes in educators’ knowledge, skills, attitudes, self-confidence, and preparedness to teach CSE to young people with disabilities. The TSE-Q is aligned with an adapted version of the theory of planned behavior. This is a second validation study of the TSE-Q embedded within a feasibility study for the BtS approach. Fifty educators and support staff from two South African special schools for people with disability participated in a BtS training workshop and completed the TSE-Q before and after the workshop. Additionally, participants were asked to complete an adapted version of Rowe, Oxman, and O’Brien’s validity questionnaire probing content validity, face validity, and ease of use. Baseline data from the TSE-Q was evaluated for reliability, while the validity questionnaire and verbal feedback were used to assess validity. Most scales show good reliability, but knowledge-based scales have lower reliability due to their multidimensionality. The TSE-Q shows good face validity, content validity, and ease of use, but should be done on different days to any intervention/training. Overall, the TSE-Q is a robust questionnaire with good content coverage.