The Role of Health Belief Attitudes, Sex Education, and Demographics in Predicting Adolescents' Sexuality Knowledge

Abstract

As part of a pretest-posttest design to evaluate a 15-hour Health Belief Model (HBM)-based sex education program, we interviewed 203 teenagers (aged 13-17) of both genders regarding their preintervention sexual and contraceptive knowledge, attitudes toward pregnancy and con traception, and prior sex education and sexual activity experiences. A multiitem sexual and contraceptive knowledge measure yielded several specific topic area scales and a total knowledge score, and a multiitem attitudes measure also yielded five reliable HBM-based scales. A series of regression analyses that used teenagers' previous sexuality-related experiences, demographic information, and attitudes predicted knowledge scores well ( R2 = 0.22-0.54). Across specific knowledge areas, HBM-based attitudes (e.g., perceived serious consequences of teen pregnancy) were consistently significant predictors. Interestingly, neither previous sex education nor personal sexual experiences were significantly associated with specific knowledge areas (e.g., venereal disease), although they were related to total knowledge scores. Similarly, age and gender were poor predictors of specific areas of knowledge, but minority ethnic status was consistently associated with less sexual and contraceptive knowledge. Our model was highly successful in accounting for a substantial portion of the variance in total knowledge scores ( R2 = 0.54). Results are discussed in terms of their implications for designing sex education programs that focus on motivation for pregnancy avoidance and contraception as well as factual information for teenagers.