Abstract
Introduction
Most emerging adults enter college with little-to-no exposure to comprehensive sexual health education. College entry provides young adults with the freedom to explore sex and relationships, but many first-year students possess inaccurate sexual health knowledge. The purpose of our study was to examine the effectiveness of a sexual health seminar at improving contraceptive knowledge and perceived sexually transmitted infection (STI) knowledge (viral, bacterial, HIV/AIDS, and other STIs) among first-semester college students.
Methods
Using a quasi-experimental design, we collected survey data at the beginning and end of the 2013 fall semester from students enrolled in our sexual health seminar (treatment group, n = 44) and students enrolled in other first-semester seminars (control group, n = 30). We expected the treatment groups’ contraceptive and perceived STI knowledge to improve from pre- to post-test. We also expected the treatment group to have higher knowledge scores than the control group at post-test. We conducted five two-way mixed ANOVAs to test our hypotheses.
Results
We found, with the exception of perceived bacterial STI knowledge, significant interaction effects. Follow-up simple main effect tests supported our hypotheses that treatment group participants’ knowledge increased from pre- to post-test and was higher than the control group at post-test.
Conclusions
Our intervention successfully improved students’ contraceptive knowledge and perceived knowledge of viral STIs, HIV/AIDS, and other STIs. Our results have implications for research on sexual health program evaluation and policies regarding adolescent and young adult sexual health education.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge Dr. Jared Durtschi for providing statistical advisement during analyses.
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee (University of Tennessee, Knoxville Institutional Review Board, UTK IRB-14–09238 B-XP) and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
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McMahan, K.D., Olmstead, S.B., Conrad, K.A. et al. Effectiveness of a Sexual Health Seminar at Improving Contraceptive and Perceived Sexually Transmitted Infection Knowledge Among First-Semester College Students. Sex Res Soc Policy 20, 32–44 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13178-021-00649-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13178-021-00649-9